Tony Lane's paintings explore the infinite
Tony Lane's paintings are an amalgam of the early Renaissance and the contemporary.
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Hawke’s Bay
Tony Lane
Infinities Black Asterisk
Until July 26
Tony Lane’s latest exhibition continues his practice of creating paintings that hover somewhere between the symbolic, mythological, religious and the scientific. Stylistically, they are an amalgam of paintings of the early Renaissance and the contemporary.
His visual language is an invention of an early Renaissance artist with features of the icon painters while his flower images could be derived from more modern artists such as Marc Chagall.
Much of the time they look as though they could be portions of frescoes, sections displaying simple shapes and objects – clouds, prayer beads tree forms, hand shapes. Then there are teardrop shapes, which could double as contemporary word balloons.
The title of the exhibition Infinities combines both the idea of the infinite as the medieval mind might have understood with its primitive notions of god, heaven and the unknown along with the modern secular approach of measuring and comprehending the infinite.
Paintings such as Blood Moon ($11,750) can be read as a simple medieval diagram of the cosmos, an enigmatic vision or a view of space from the window of a spacecraft.
Speaking Landscape ($13,750), which features large golden speech balloon shapes and then clouds is a complex and witty reference to the medieval text, The Cloud of Unknowing, along with speech balloons of lost or yet to be displayed texts.
With all the works there is a sense of mystery where symbols have multiple interpretations and meanings. There is a strange mixture of known and invented landscape, real and imagined events, simple objects which have magical, symbolic and scientific meanings.
There is also mystery around the various flower and tree paintings in the show. The three trees in I Have Buried My Treasure Under These Trees ($5750) with their Easter bun-like shapes can be read as some Christian symbolism of the crucifixion along with the reference to the ancient notion of Adam being buried at the site of Calvary.
John Daly-Peoples
Fri, 14 Jul 2017
Fri, 14 Jul 2017
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Tony Lane's paintings explore the infinite
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