Heavyweight with a light touch

By MALCOLM BURGESS

The light in New Zealand is said to be similar to that in the south of France, sought after by artists for its superior hues. So it must be some kind of paradise for expat Brad Lochore, a self-confessed "painter of light", who escaped the gloom of his London home to rekindle ties with his birth nation. But you could just as easily say he deals in the currency of shadows, something the British capital certainly has no shortage of.

Like a modern-day Rip van Winkle, Lochore's memories of New Zealand and what now confronts him are markedly different. He is shocked by the rampant spread of suburbia and the loss of native bush and forest. But it was 1977 when the then-17-year-old left "as a form of escape" to seek his destiny in the wider world.

After briefly spending time in Australia, he visited Paris and Berlin before settling into art school in London. Before long, he met the German artist Gerhard Richter at a gallery opening, and was duly invited to study at the famous Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, Germany, where the late, great Joseph Beuys had studied.

Although invited to stay longer, he returned after a year to do his MA at Goldsmiths College in London, and was taken up early in the 90s by the Victoria Miro gallery.

"And then [art collector Charles] Saatchi bought all my work and the rest is history, really," he says.

Being an artist in London wasn't always the high life.

"Most of us left art school with no real notion that we were ever going to sell work," says Lochore.

He would scrape together cash doing huge backdrops for Christian Lacroix's haute couture and pret-a-porter shows in Paris. "We were all hustling for money to be in the studio. You can't flip burgers at night - you've got to make money fast."

Saatchi had already bought a fair amount of Lochore's work, but it was his inclusion in 1995 in the exhibition Young British Artists 4 alongside Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin that launched his career. "As a consequence I was bandied around and bundled in with the Young British Artists phenomenon."

Things certainly changed for him, as it did for the whole scene. "As a young artist, people at parties would once cough politely and turn away. Now it's the funkiest thing to be, even funkier than a pop musician."

He returned to New Zealand for the first time three years ago, just after his first daughter was born. "I'd kind of just been too busy. I'd either been too poor to come back and, when I was successful, I didn't really have time."

But curiosity got the better of him: "Although I feel very much at home in London, [New Zealand] seemed like it was another planet and I wanted to go and visit that planet."

Lochore's first New Zealand show at the Gow Langsford finds in his trademark subject a range of expression as wide and varied as the edge of a shadow is complex.

There is the hypnotic immediacy of a rotating fan's blur, the memory of memories evoked through the ambiguous shape of a childhood swing, and computer-generated shadows he describes as "monkey puzzles with no relation to reality".

The golden glow of a Los Angeles sunset in Hedge could as easily be a reference to a burning bush, and the special light of Venice during the recent Biennale shines through in Lamp to cast what Lochore sees as a shadow of a woman carrying bowls of fruit.

As shadows of real and imagined objects, they are better than Rorschach tests for illuminating parts of you, the viewer, that you can't directly see.

To Lochore, shadows are "the most appropriate way to discuss the problem of an image - any image". He finds all forms of image-making "terribly problematic". He says we have never before been so assaulted by images, and that it "seemed an appropriate course of action to engage with them very directly".

But for such contemporary issues, why painting, one of the oldest forms of image-making? "Painting can draw into its field the work of computer images, photographic images and cinematic images. It just so happens for me that painting is a particularly attractive way to enact those questions and queries about the world." If past masters such as Caravaggio or Rembrandt had had such devices they would have used them too, he says.

Like Oasis and Blur, the Young British Artists will be remembered for a particular moment in time, no matter what they do in their later years.

However, Lochore has found a way to introduce his established persona to New Zealand and start anew by including works produced in London as well as those done in recent weeks at a Waiheke studio. To get the best of both worlds he calls this show "a mini retrospective with a substantial body of new works".

He may think of himself as "old and grumpy", but Lochore is youthful in appearance and outlook.

At least when he comes back to the place he grew up in, there will always be an ambitious 17-year-old waiting to hear about what happens when you take a risk and trust the world will recognise talent when it sees it.

Exhibition

* Who: Brad Lochore

* Where and when: Gow Langsford Gallery, to March 6