Milan Mrkusich ‘Painting Dark’

Let me make a suggestion. That you attempt to view Milan Mrkusich’s Painting Dark (1972) ‘in the flesh’. In the case of no other New Zealand painter is the photograph, including the best colour plate, more mendacious than in Mrkusich’s. The physicality of a Mrkusich painting and its presence as an object are critical. Until you see the painting in person you have not begun to see it at all. His pictures are emphatically objects. They are in scale with the viewer’s body but their brushwork has a disembodying effect; it attracts and disassociates at the same time. Furthermore, when you do get to view Painting Dark make sure that you register some of the following effects. Seen from a distance, on first entering the room, you will experience the overall prompt of seeing a single red colour field. As you step forwards, toward a middle distance, this ground changes. It begins to now look like atmosphere and dematerialises the canvas, making it seem hazy and velvety. The canvas may seem to pulsate, as if to echo the physical movement you have just undertaken. Then, moving in again, up close, the painted surface provides a very different reading from the diffused, cloudy one you have just experienced. Visible now are the foregrounding and backgrounding of colours as effects of underpainting.

Mrkusich makes it known that the genesis of his painting, as well as its viewing, is inseparable from the unseen work done of its background. Because of this things are happening everywhere on the surface. Here in a ‘close-to’ viewing it is also now that the geometric elements — the corners that give the series of paintings its name — appear to stand out from the surface field on which they are seemingly added. Mrkusich’s corners operate like the stones you might place at the corners of a loose page to stop it lifting in the breeze. Like a graphic mat the corners hold the image down, isolating it for purely visual contemplation. Both McCahon and Walters were to use the device at a later date. This sequence of illusions, of textures, which change as the viewer’s distance and interaction with the painting changes, means that the atmospheric sensation of Painting Dark is an effect set within a system. It requires, as I have labelled it elsewhere, ‘a phenomenology of seeing’, this is the process which I have just described. It is of prime significance that the fascination with surface, the tenuousness of what is represented, draws one’s attention to the materiality of the painting. No other New Zealand painter has devoted himself so whole-heartedly to the cultivation of feeling. In Mrkusich’s most effective paintings, like Painting Dark, hues harmonise and saturation is more or less consistent. This consistency, we could call it an ‘assonance’, intensifies one’s sense of the painting’s almost preternatural beauty. Painting Dark, as its title intimates, is dusky and full of retentive hues but still retains a sizzle. The process puts the viewer’s mind on edge, imperceptibly irritates it into providing answers for the shape of things, their movement and instability. It is the painting’s impossible range of subtleties that, going beyond our ability to register them fully, at once ravish and frustrate the eye. This device is the key to the particular subjective involvement with Mrkusich at his best. It is also why we might characterise Mrkusich’s as ‘slow painting’, for you only get the image gradually as the previous layers beneath the surface emerge and resonate. His paintings are to be viewed episodically, time after time, without final resolution. They are produced from within a tremendous range of emotional energy and deep thought. He asks you as a viewer to find your own equilibrium through a contemplative viewing. All we can do with a painting like Painting Dark is to come back to look at it again.

Laurence Simmons