but not Sad
Milli Jannides’ recent exhibition, Sympathy Activity at Mossman, Wellington, is a dissonant collection of works painted over the course of 2019 from the artist’s base in Portugal. Across 14 variously sized paintings, intensity rises and mutes, colours and surfaces shift, matte opacity appears against faintly shiny ridges of oil paint. To view the show collectively impels questioning of logic and meanings, sources and references. Most of all, we are drawn in by the idiosyncrasies of each work, into the individual world it opens.
Given the unravelling of a global pandemic, the idea of being physically in an art exhibition feels remote at present. Our modes of viewing are certainly different. The uncertainties extending from this meet with something latent in . A strange breadth in the show is evident regardless of how we view it. We wonder about the works’ creation—it is hard to know from where they derive and how they are linked together. They do not seem to be by a single artist.
