Essays
Posted on 31 July 2023
Laurence Simmons on Ralph Hotere ‘4 + 4’
Featured in Important Paintings & Contemporary Art | Tuesday 15 August 2023
Ralph Hotere produced a number of works entitled Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro, initiated in 1991, which were predominantly black lacquered works on glass, with gold leaf, and gold dust, set within recycled colonial window frames. 4+4 (1996) is one of the finest of these works. Others include Lo negro sobre lo oro (1992) (Te Papa) and Night window Carey’s Bay (1995). In most cases gold leaf was applied to the underside of the glass then painted over with black lacquer — hence the title of the series which translates as ‘the black over the gold’. The work is then viewed through the glass from the opposite side to the applied paint and the gold leaf appears as encased within the black. In many of these works, four square swatches of gold leaf are set within the four corners of the frame. Sometimes the gold is arranged in the form of a cross, and other times the application is of a fluid nature, resembling flame or liquid. In one work, the gold is rendered in an expressionistic splattering wherein parts the gold forms a layer from which clouds of dust emanate. The predominant quality of the surfaces of the Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro works is characteristically reflective, creating an effect that intentionally places the viewer mirrored within the image. The gloss finish literally reflects the presence of the viewer, so in a sense the viewer becomes part of the interpretation of the work. The title and the juxtaposition of black and gold are full of resonances both spiritual and quotidian.
The smears of gold leaf are redolent of the candle light of a Catholic mass, or the gilded surfaces of much Catholic architecture. Gold recalls the iconography of the gold haloes of saints of medieval painting, or its use to represent heaven in the background planes of religious icons. For American art historian, Thomas McEvilley, gold is “an expression of a religiosity that exalts death as well as life, or conflates them into a Liebstod or love-death unity.” The title also betrays the connection of these works with Hotere’s experience in Spain (his first visit to Spain was in the 1960s and there were subsequent return visits). One version has ‘Window in Spain’ inscribed on its surface, and surely he would have known the following lines of Federico García Lorca’s poem Noche/Night, almost an ekphrasis of his own painting 4+4:
Ventanitas de oro
tiemblan,
y en la aurora se mecen
Cruces superpuestas.
Little window of gold
trembling,
and cross upon cross
rocking in the dawn.
The gold leaf of 4+4 is a liquid evanescent presence, four squares of gold leaf are placed in formal alignment with the window frame, the gold bleeds into the black, the square edges smudge and fall apart into dust in a controlled demolition. The jostle of mismatched marks and textures enable an exhilarating sense of participation, as if we are viewing a calculated process of disintegration. Hotere’s textures stumble over one another in bouquets of slithery spirals dense with detail. Four tiny crosses chase each other down the centre line into oblivion refusing to be decoded. Gregory O’Brien has convincingly shown that the ‘tenebrae’, the darknesses of Hotere’s art and their perpetual swallowing up of meaning, recreate for the viewer the mystical rapture of traditions of Catholicism. The series Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro is, to paraphrase Ian Wedde, one of the multiple ways Hotere claimed black as his signature and the darkness as illumination. Pacific writer Albert Wendt, in Merata Mita’s documentary on Hotere, insists that he restores ‘to the colour black, or to darkness, the Māori and Polynesian view of darkness as being the very fecund and fertile darkness out of which all life comes, because it is a live creature ... the darkness itself is very alive.’ If 4+4 strikes me as a culminating work, it is because it feels rash, rough, magnetic in its doubt as well as its confidence. In a word, alive.
Laurence Simmons
Illustrated Above:
