If the story of New Zealand painting can be seen as a ribbon that ties the work of our most prominent practitioners back to early 20th century European roots, then Kristian Lomath's work is tied to one of those strands.
That painterly heritage is not clear and strong in NewZealand. But in Christchurch in the 1990s at the Ilam school of Art where Kristian studied, the presence of previous generations of painters was felt as keenly as anywhere in the country.
The southern New Zealand landscape left its impression on Bill Sutton, Colin McCahon, Toss Woolleston and others and they in turn created ways of seeing "our place". Euan McLeod, who recently showed at the Tauranga gallery, also studied in Christchurch and Kristian's work can be viewed in the context of all these artists, and their engagement with the experience and idea of landscape through the medium of oil paint.
His work can also be viewed in the light of the abstract expressionist school of New York painters, who liked to imagine their roots reaching much further back to a primal place of subconscious and universal energy. It was his encounter with the New York painters that so affected McCahon when he first visited the US in the 1960s.
In his work, Kristian orchestrates immersive mosaic like spaces. His paintings are meditations on a personal experience of landscape recorded by individual dabs and sweeps of a brush loaded with paint. In some work these brush strokes are marshalled into tight geometries, in some they flow like sinews and muscles. Some paintings come close to describing form, but never more than in relief, they never fully describe deep space. A clue to Kristian's work is found in his smaller works which reveal the compositional scaffolding at work throughout larger pieces.
His work invites the viewer to find recognisable forms and to make connections between the micro and macro structures in the patterning, but inevitably the eye is led back to the surface, to the essential act of painting; back to the surface, the physical stuff of oil paint, the rough canvas and the frame that supports it, and back to the hand of the maker.
Under the Skin of the Landscape will be displayed at Zeus Gallery, 106 11th Ave, where he exhibits regularly and is scheduled for a self titled, solo exhibition from June 26-July 11.
