Noel Ivanoff at Vavasour Godkin

Noel Ivanoff paints in the formalist tradition. Picture / Greg Bowker

Noel Ivanoff works in the formalist tradition, art which reveals the artifice surrounding art. He focuses on materials, construction and context.

Around the walls of his studio, a large prefabricated shed at the bottom of a narrow Grey Lynn section, are the results of Ivanoff's one-term of sabbatical from his role as head of painting at Wickliffe Art School - two contrasting series of works.

There are flat panel works on meticulously prepared pieces of marine ply which are based on building materials and colours.

"I built a field of colour, with brush marks showing the gesture with the hand, and when that was dry I filled that surface with another layer of oil paint applied with a plasterer's trowel, so in effect I have skim coated the paintings," Ivanoff says.

"There is the abstract expressionist gesture thing in the work, but it is denied by the utilitarian processes. I have always loved watching plasterers work, I find that as interesting as the texture of great artists.

"I also like the idea that the structure of a stretcher echoes the structure of a wall, so a painting is a model of the wall behind it."

The other works are constructed on shipping pallets and packers. Ivanoff added pieces of hardboard and then painted them white, creating a modified surface which contrasts with the raw pine below.

"I wanted to have this inelegant support, this difficult support I then had to correct in some way.

"When I paint on a traditional support, I make it myself and it tends to be very well made, with good joinery and good gesso, but I wanted this other support to deal with, a readymade, coming from another vernacular," he says, pointing with relish to a spray of green paint on a pallet, perhaps the mark of some stocktake, and to crayon marks on a packer.

"I want a thing where, while still being in the minimalist tradition, I don't want a loss of touch."

Ivanoff picked up a Diploma in Fine Arts at Otago Polytechnic in 1984 before winning a scholarship to St Martin's School of Art in London.

He had some success in England with landscape-based paintings, but turned to formalist abstraction on his return to New Zealand a decade ago, after a two-year spell in Japan.

"Going to Japan was a revelation. It was interesting for me to not have a space, not be oil painting, to have to take a break from all my habits, and that's when I really started to look at qualities of materials," Ivanoff says.

"My father was a builder, then a joiner when his back went, so I worked a lot in a joinery factory when I was going to college, so there is an element I feel an affinity with.

"I come from the formalist tradition, so I have to acknowledge it is the context in which I work, but I'm not sure about that Rothkoesque, transcendental, lofty modernism," he says, referring to the influence of American artist Mark Rothko. "I always want to keep returning the viewer to things that are utilitarian."

What: Depot, by Noel Ivanoff
Where and when: Vavasour Godkin, 35 High St, to Oct 8
An earlier set of Ivanoff's pallet-based works, Stacker P16, will be part of the GPS group show at Whitecliffe's Randolf St Gallery, tomorrow to Oct 14