Trevor Moffitt exhibition bears witness to a bold, blunt truth

By T.J. McNAMARA

The term "bearing witness" exactly applies to the secular art of Trevor Moffitt seen in his retrospective exhibition at the Warwick Henderson Gallery in Parnell.

Throughout his long painting career, Moffitt has been better received in the South Island, where public galleries hold substantial collections of his work, than in Auckland.

He has always been the epitome of the rugged individualist, immune to fashion or influence. His paintings are always simple, broad and strong. They hack away the detail and try to fix the essence of an aspect of life or of legend. Many of his paintings, always with a bold signature, might bear the title that Goya once used, This I Saw. Like lyric poetry, they take an autobiographical experience and endow it with something universal. They bear unsentimental witness to how things are.

The kind of blunt truth that is part of a Moffitt painting can be seen at its most raw in the Canterbury Paddock Series. Cow Paddock No. 2 and Deer Paddock No. 1 show cows or a deer in a paddock, archetypically, eternally fixed in a way that is beyond a photograph.

The approach can be very moving when the broad style is allied to sharp observation and excellence of drawing as in The Empty Mailbox, which depicts an old woman going to check the letter-box. The way her back bends as she supports herself on the box with her left hand is exactly true and surpasses the more static pathos of O.K. Grandad You Look Out the Window and I'll be Back in Three Hours.

This retrospective show is titled Women and there is a large group of works from 1976-77 that are nudes and nude portraits as well as a dozen or more paintings from Moffitt's Human Condition Series.

The nudes are solid flesh, their lumpish bodies matched by truculent expressions. One characteristic is often emphasised - black hair in Nude Model, a curtain of yellow hair in Nordic with the addition of a bleak mouth indicated by a single brush stroke.

The best of these paintings of women have a sense of place. Young, confident, Angela No. 1, with her prominent pubic hair, is set against a door with a stained-glass panel that gives an evocative sense of time and place.

Such signs work well in the genre series about dancing competitions and a young woman's trip to Japan. Irish Jig is a single figure set in the absolute distillation of a school hall. The tail fin of an aircraft sets the scene of departure in Language Scholarship to Japan. When these establishing signs, however simple, are absent, the paintings become banal, even crude, particularly in works such as Ballet No. 3.

This retrospective does not give us the complete Moffitt. The absence of the gripping series about his father going to war, the paintings about Mackenzie the sheep stealer, and the strange series about salmon fishing are absent, but there is enough to convey the special, idiosyncratic nature of the achievement of this substantial painter.

In contrast, the exhibition of work by Kura Te Waru Rewiri at the Ferner Gallery, also in Parnell, is a small show for a painter of her reputation and one who has splendid work in Purangiaho at the Auckland Art Gallery.

The painting that is a key to the exhibition is Waiting for a Vision where a series of horizons suggest both sea and land. Across these horizontals are a variety of revelations in sequences. Each little vertical patch of colour, predominantly blue and red, is a small moment of revelation, each an epiphany.

The exhibition is titled Tatari Te Hau: Wait for Breath but the largest painting, Barriers has several rectangular areas where the paint, quiet and sombre, is worked in various ways to convey mood. Bars of strong, unmixed colour - blue and red alongside white and black - contrast with the softer moods of the rest of the painting.

The sharpness and definition extend to the other big painting, Waiting to Breathe 2001, where symbols surround the land, the sky and the house that spread across the work.

The show includes several drawings which reveal a variety of approaches but all suggest anticipation of an arrival. In The Whales Are Coming, shapes and signs loom out of the dark while in The Whales Are Coming Here there is an intricate pattern of tracks based on the stars that elsewhere stand proud against the dark in Even the Stars Have Boundaries. The sense of approach is allied to the potential for growth in the graceful He Kakahu o Te Whenua.

Throughout, there is a sense of thought and deep involvement and, in the use of sharp-edged forms, a sense of a new direction and continuing development.