Bureaucratic nonsense, barriers to relationships, attitudes to life and an artist's personal journey mingle together in Simon Payton's latest series of works Standing on Pedestals. Payton, formerly based in Masterton and living in Auckland for the past 10 years, unveiled the new works to 150 people at Greytown's RiverEast Gallery on Saturday. In an often-involved process the paintings, generally mixed on canvas, are built from layers of acrylic mediums and pigments, which are sometimes ground back down. "The work is finished when I feel the story has been told or I've really come to the end of what I can do. "I observe life and it comes out in the work. "The process is starting from nothing with no thought about where it might finish and can be quite obtuse but the narrative becomes clear as time evolves." This new process is part of Payton's reinvention as an artist and part of the continuing departure from his pre-2002 style, which he said was strongly narrative and representational in essence "It's been five years since I changed direction and my work since then has been more abstract and expressionist and that's where I've been sitting in the genre, it's a lot more cerebral," he said. The exhibition's title, Standing on Pedestals, carries a political undertone pointed at those in power who deign to direct us, he said. "Some of the signature paintings are about people standing up and telling us how to live our lives like politicians telling us how to spend our money." The 27 works incorporate four series' themed around his own personal journey for the last 15 years, the barriers put up in relationships, bureaucratic nonsense and attitudes to life, he said. Individual pieces also populate the exhibition, including Erstwhile Memories, a painting Payton said was inspired by the "imagining of Joseph Masters looking down from the Rimutaka Hill and seeing Wairarapa for the first time and seeing it bathed in sunshine, which would have been quite spectacular." "In this collection of paintings the relationship between subject and content, between surface and layered meaning, between controlled gesture and large sweeps of colour suggests transformation and timelessness, a place to go to even if only in ones mind," Carole Shepheard, artist and senior lecturer at Elam School of Fine Art in Auckland, said of Payton's artistic incarnation.
