‘‘Tangimoana’’, Karl Maughan
(Milford Galleries)
KARL MAUGHAN’S gardenscapes of brilliant flowering shrubs in a tightlycompressed composition are instantly recognisable. Each painting has a garden path, or a suggestion of one, that leads the viewer through the bright shrubs to a middistant range of predominantly green foliage. Often one side of the path and shrubbery will be cast in shadow. Given the centrality of gardens in Western religious traditions, it is tempting (pun intentional) to consider the garden with path, and contrasting light and shadow as a trope, though not necessarily a religious one.
In the context of this exhibition, and the artists oeuvre more broadly, Maughan’s paintings pivot on this tension between insistent life and the shadow of decay, even as the stridency of the orange, pink, purple, and yellow flower bushes appear to resist cyclical imperatives. There is urgency, if not near emergency to the high tone of these colours as they press in on the viewer. Even in shadow the brilliance of the flowers is barely dimmed.
Maughan’s boxy compositions amplify a feeling of compression. All of the action takes place in the foreground as it graduates to midground. By cropping out the sky and reducing depth in this way, the flowers perpetual bloom begins to feel uncanny, as if this is turbo nature. Although figurative, Maughan’s iterative practice approaches abstraction.