Te Uru encourages viewers to look for longer
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Recent paintings by James Cousins are brought together for the first time in Restless Idiom, his first solo exhibition in a public gallery, opening 28 November at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery in Titirangi.
James Cousins, a lecturer at Elam School of Fine Arts and a highly regarded painter, has long been interested in how we understand painting.
“One of the core motivations for my work at its beginning was to ask ‘what is a painting?’”, says Cousins. “When does a painting stop becoming a painting? And how does it operate as an artwork?”
Questions about the nature and limits of painting are not new, and have a lineage that traces back over the decades. Unlike many of his antecedents, however, Cousins is less concerned with the irreducible essence of painting and interested more in the generative and pluralistic possibilities that can come from re-mapping familiar terrain.
His recent works, which are brought together for the first time in this exhibition, specifically reconsider landscape images. Each painting consists of a reproduced image, mostly sourced from colour plates in a botanical guide. Though they may be familiar as types of flowers or trees, layers of paint interfere with their completion.
The systems used to fracture the image are an important part of Cousins’ practice. In most of these paintings, layers of vinyl stencils are applied to a base layer of paint. An image is reproduced faithfully on top of the stencil, which, when removed, reveals glimpses of the ground paint. Cousins often then applies another layer of paint to further interrupt the image. The recognisable is consequently sandwiched between, under and on top of the abstract.
The result is a captivating optical instability, where the eye constantly oscillates between fleeting recognisable representations of flora and fauna as perceived from afar, and the abstractions of colour and geometry when viewed up close.
“Because of their to-and-fro nature, these works prompt an active and prolonged type of looking”, says curator Ioana Gordon-Smith”. “As a viewer, you’re constantly trying to work out what you’re looking at and how the paintings have been constructed.”
Cousins agrees, hoping that the works encourage people to look a little bit longer. “When the work is good, it’s about slowing things down”, he says.
Restless Idiom runs at Te Uru from 28 November 2015 – 21 February 2016.
Hours: 10am–4.30pm daily.
420 Titirangi Road, Titirangi
09 817 8087
For more information, contact info@teuru.org.nz.