Reasons to be cheerful: small things
Scattered throughout Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, small paintings on aluminium appear in unusual places: near artworks in the historical and permanent collections, around corners and high on walls in the foyer. They have a presence greater than their size, marking their territory in a subtle yet emphatic manner.
Richard van der Aa notices things. Where other people are drawn directly towards a master painting in a gallery, he checks out the surrounding architectural details, the patterns on a parquet floor or a light switch throwing an unusual shadow. These everyday, ordinary visual notations nourish his artistic practice as he travels around his adopted new home – the city of Paris.
Not strictly geometric, these small things are created freehand; their articulation and quality come from a painterly skill in which observations are rendered in an expressionistic yet objective manner. Lines are scraped into the coloured surfaces: horizons, corners, arrows and grids that sometimes echo aspects of their immediate surroundings. Van der Aa’s method is to question what makes something a work of art. What is the difference between life and art? Where is the line between what is art and what is not?
Always his work is about relationships and contexts that link objects and art by exploring the connections between the physical details of a space and how they can affect each other in a spontaneous manner. Stumbling upon one of these paintings without being aware of van der Aa’s intention, you may think it is a light switch or a sensor on the wall. Yet small things have another reason to be there. A grouping of three coloured shapes high in a corner by the oriel window in the Gallery dance like prisms of thrown light. A round creamy-white shape incised with a grid sits near a table lamp like an inversion of the lamp’s interior that has suddenly bounced onto the wall. A red diamond appears above Milan Mrkusich’s Chromatic Variations, precisely the same colour as a small square in the composition, its jewel-like presence also creating a surprising series of red links with the other surrounding artworks.
Van der Aa has specifically placed some of his paintings near works in the permanent collections that have particular meaning for him. There is the teenage memory of contemplating Colin McCahon’s Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is and being captivated by its obscure yet profound content, or recalling the melancholic beauty of Petrus van der Velden’s The Dutch Funeral. These interventions mark a path through the Gallery, denoting van der Aa’s connections to the tradition of Canterbury painting that has helped to shape him as an artist. McCahon’s tau cross is evoked in a small cross shape that rests elegantly in the upper corner of the wall where Tomorrow will be the same… hangs, its colour perfectly reflecting the cool grey white within McCahon’s reduced landscape. A pale blue striped circle hovers jauntily above Don Peebles’ s Untitled A4, and a green rectangle with a gestural black circle placed opposite Ralph Hotere’s Maladay Panels also evokes the influence on van der Aa of Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Yves Klein.
Although aspects of New Zealand art have remained an imprinted, enduring experience, for Richard van der Aa, it is the everyday things that are his ‘reasons to be cheerful’, the raison d’être of his art making, as he transforms them into multiplying and reverberating ‘small things’.
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