The Unreliable Guide at Ivan Anthony Gallery

Piled up in Julian Hooper's studio are small watercolour drawings, doodles almost. These are the raw material for his increasingly large and complex paintings, in which fragments of half-remembered landscapes dreamily merge with organic shapes and slabs of colour.

"I arrive at the motifs in the paintings as sort of a separate activity," says Hooper. "Sometimes the activity works but a lot of the time that initial stage of trying to invent forms and create new entities and characters doesn't work. They are sort of still-born or miscarriages.

"Those that do work I then want to give life to. They are all lifeless until they are put into a painting and start to make friends with other shapes and start to work together to create a place or an environment, or whatever."

While some of his shapes and his approach to collage might seem to indicate similarities with the work of Richard Killeen, Hooper cites older influences.

"I see it going back to Breughel and Bosch, and in some ways, while it doesn't look like a painter such as Miro, there are fundamental similarities of creating a space or a background into which you float forms and investigate the possibilities of the relationships that can happen.

"Paintings have different passages - there are times I feel I can put paint on like Titian, other times I feel what I am painting resembles some children's sticker. But it is not arbitrary for me. The whole work and how everything works together is a concern. It doesn't work until things are evoking some kind of truth, some kind of echo of how I see the world," Hooper says.

There is also a sense of duration, as if animation cells were floated past each other until the right composition appeared. Hooper likens it to a landscape painter moving elements around.

"Even at that simple, traditional level, it is interesting why a painter would do that, why they move a tree a bit to the right. Then you free up the game so that you can move the tree into the sky if you want, move things into a new order not based on gravity."

The surrealist organics of Yves Tanguay also come to mind, while on a compositional level, the picture plane may be as charged as a Mondrian.

"It might sound absurd to some people but I feel there is some kind of kinship between this work, and when I look at the way a Mondrian operates, or a Gordon Walters, there is a kind of highly considered manipulation of composition."

For his large-scale works, Hooper switches between oils and giant watercolours, a notoriously unforgiving medium to work in.

"There is a kind of logic to working in watercolours: you have to go about it in a certain way - you can't just do the things you want," says Hooper. "It is a bit like a jigsaw in a way. Corrections can be dicey, and it is often best to let things happen. It is a matter of having the control to let go."

Hooper, who graduated from Elam art school in 1988, began painting simple, landscape-based work. Complexity came relatively recently.

"It was about about having lots of ideas and wanting to do all of them and suspecting there is something false about being too selective with ideas. I would rather tackle all of them.

"This way of painting, this complex stuff and loaded imagery, is a way to give credence to all these ideas I have, the imagery I find and make, which can then enter into a kind of painting world," he says.

Exhibition

*What: The Unreliable Guide, by Julian Hooper
*Where and when: Ivan Anthony Gallery, 312 Karangahape Rd, to June 4