‘‘Blue Daisy Chain’’, Peter Cleverley
(RDS Gallery) A VISIT to a Peter Cleverley exhibition is always an immersion into a private exploration of the interconnectedness of the world, presented in a cryptic personal language known to the artist alone.
‘‘Blue Daisy Chain’’ is no exception. Cleverley’s canvases offer memory traces, fleeting thoughts, links to a place and a time, and mystic indictments of human actions towards fellow humans and the natural world alike. These are sad connections for the most part — a blue daisy chain indeed.
The bluegreen palette also reflects Cleverley’s viewpoint, seeing the world from our dots of land at the edge of a wide cyan ocean, and from a land on the
‘‘wrong’’ side of the world. Despite this, many of the images are directly inspired by the artist’s travels, most specifically in Southeast Asia. Most of the works are dominated by the presence of gaunt, ghostlike people — some unnervingly upsidedown — and two of the works,
Appear and Blue Daisy Chain, cryptically act as near mirror images of each other, one upright and one inverted.
Echoes of earlier New Zealand art appear in Cleverley’s work, most notably the McCahonlike use of the cross as a symbol, not so much of conventional Christianity but of an omnipresent benevolent ‘‘otherness’’, a hope to hold on to in a world gone mad.