Adrian Jackman plays games of visual trickery

Adrian Jackman, Still Life with Landscape
nkb Gallery, Mt Eden
Until May 31

Ostensibly the title of Adrian Jackman’s latest exhibition follows in the tradition of artists who painted still life objects with a landscape background. Such paintings were filled with objects, often symbolic set against known or invented landscapes.

Mr Jackman’s landscapes however depart from that form of presentation. They are a combination of a bird's-eye view of landscape along with a kaleidoscope of the shapes and colours of the built environment. These paintings look as though they are vast jigsaw puzzles which have been incorrectly assembled, some pieces seemingly linked, others disrupting the picture plane.

The still life works – a mixture of objects and figures sees the artist playing games of visual trickery as he reaches back into nineteenth and twentieth century art reworking and combining them. There are refences and borrowing from the Impressionist, the Cubists as well as Andy Warhol.

Still Life with Landscape No 4 ($4650) features a yacht referencing Andy Warhol’s painting Do it Yourself (Sailboat) from his 'Paint by Numbers' series which took their inspiration from teach yourself painting books

Still Life with Landscape No 2 ($4650) has a figure lifted from Seurat’s Bathers as Asniers while Popular Mechanics ($5800) has images which morph between various objects – a tape cassette and a bicycle along with other overlapping shapes.

As with many Cubist paintings the surfaces of the works are disrupted with shapes, changing perspectives and brightly coloured, overlapping templates.

While the Impressionist pointillist painters used small spots of paint which shimmered with light and energy Mr Jackman’s colour palette seems to consist of small paint swatches creating a collage of dislocated colours.

This concern for colour is shown in a more abstract form with a couple of smaller works which such as Chromatic Landscape No 2 ($2700) where blocks of colour are linked to ideas about the relationship between colour and music.

This is supplied content and not commissioned or paid for by NBR.