John Pule

Another Green World
21 November - 16 December 2006

John Pule’s exhibition, Another Green World, presents a new body of work painted in both New Zealand and Fiji, where Pule has been in residence in recent months. Two limited edition lithographs will be released to coincide with this exhibition, as well as an accompanying illustrated catalogue with writing by Nicholas Thomas.

In upcoming months Pule's work will also be exhibited as part of The 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery in Australia (opening in December 2006), and also Turbulence: the 3rd Auckland Triennial (opening in March 2007), curated by Victoria Lynn.

The following is an excerpt of writing by Nicholas Thomas (Director of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology).

The writhing animals in John Pule’s new paintings are alive but desperate, injured yet potent. If these imaginary, open-mouthed creatures are most obviously dangerous predators, they are also somehow social players, maybe performers of ritual terror, rather than true terrorists. Pule’s paintings are full of paradoxes like this. They feature histories but no narratives, symbols but no culture, and geographic sites but no literal space. The most recent works are, moreover, both unexpected and familiar. Those who knew John Pule’s painting through the 1990s will recognize motifs - the profile of Rangitoto, churches, tears, and copulating couples among them - but it is what has changed that is more dramatic. The new works have an open and unbounded quality that is arresting, even disorienting.

Pule’s works of the 1990s were always ‘full’. They were made up of fields, sometimes a loose grid, sometimes a mix of rectangular and circular forms, that occupied more or less the entire surface of the painting. Those fields and forms in turn contained a busy mix of figures, scenes, and botanical and geometric motifs. Suppressing distinctions between the figurative and the abstract, these works represented tracts of land and locations, notably around Pule’s birthplace in the village of Liku, Niue. They also depicted acts and movements, but in an imaginative realm rather than a literal space. Their ‘full’ character also amounted to a cultural reference - Pule was drawing loosely on the animated, experimental hiapo, the barkcloth paintings of nineteenth century Niue. Yet his engagement was not so much with a Niuean tradition - implying an organic connection with a collective heritage - as with a divisive history, experienced personally through migration and loss as well as love and land.

The orientation has shifted. The earlier works were like maps of space and story. Our view now is of atmospheric rather than terrestrial space. We look out into a cloudscape, but the clouds seem are made up of blood, are interlinked by plant growths, and those plants are associated with lives, origins, and nurture. Yet many of the characters betwixt and between the plants and clouds are dismembered. Calamities appear to be unfolding. Aeroplanes, great bodies, are sliced apart, trophy heads are being carried away by tiny figures, actors who make their way precariously between islets in a void. The ground of these images is an emptiness that stretches away, rather than a completeness of growth and land.

Even when their reference to Polynesian design was most overt, Pule’s paintings were always activations that alluded to pattern, rather than decorative re-enactments of it. His work has been energized, in part because it has proceeded from a consciousness of a profoundly disturbed history. While that history and experience incorporates moments of ecstasy, its dark side has always stood out, and is increasingly potent and threatening in the great works that make up this exhibition. The visual architecture and elegance of these paintings is astonishing. They are weirdly beautiful. Yet the world they suggest is less anchored in culture than shaped by terror.

Gow Langsford Gallery

John Pule