‘‘Paintings for a Black Pavilion’’, Craig Easton
(Brett McDowell Gallery)
IT would be a simplification of sorts to reduce Craig Easton’s body of primarily abstract paintings and drawings to a fusion of Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions and cultures, yet there is an element of this dialectic.
Easton, a Dunedinborn artist, has also spent a considerable amount of time living in Shanghai, and this experience appears to have embedded itself in his work. It is discernible in the dual English/Mandarin titles of some works, the paredback, reoriented, and subtle presence of stylised Chinese characters or hanzi in several works, yet these are only the most immediate indicators. Otherwise it is tantalisingly difficult to firmly identify what gives these paintings their “Eastern” sensibility. This is in part due to the primary orientation of Easton’s work towards Western
abstract traditions, particularly the work of Kazimir Malevich and his infamous Black Square
(1915), and white on white paintings.
Easton’s engagement with Malevich pervades the exhibition of 24 paintings and drawings by way of exhibition and painting titles (several reference Malevich’s term ‘‘nonobjective’’ for abstraction/
Suprematism), and formalist experiments with line, shape, and composition, particularly the arrangement of planar forms to each other and the frame.
Each work is installed in a specific sequence that begins, in Chinese tradition, with the first painting on the right instead of the left, and intends to resolve a formal enquiry that, in turn, generates a subsequent enquiry. The viewer proceeds through a Chinese literati garden.