Scanning en plein air

Now based in Vienna, Andre Hemer came out of Christchurch and onto the scene in the early 2000s, one amongst many taking a blowtorch to the formal values of abstract painting. His playful amalgamations of paint and computer-generated imagery were easy on the eye but difficult to evaluate: innovative or merely clever? As time goes on, I admire more and more Hemer’s seriousness, ambition and refusal to rest on any one bag of tricks.

When I see Hemer’s paintings I feel materials. Paint is more palpable than ever in Hemer’s most recent exhibition, , at Gow Langsford Gallery in Auckland. A few blobs of the stuff stick out from otherwise immaculately flat surfaces, as if to emphasise to the viewer that these are indeed paintings despite the intervention of scanner, computer and printer―that at the beginning of Hemer’s long, elaborate process, there was paint. The paintings divide into pale pictures (pink, mauve, silver, gold) and dark ones (subtitled ‘evening’). They are abstract and unmistakably contemporary, but also have many of the hallmarks of what is loosely dubbed ‘old master’ painting: juicy paint-handling,