Ralph Hotere 'Port Chalmers Painting No. 2'

There is a rock to guard every sacred harbour in New Zealand. It but waits its hour.

John Caselberg

Among the most austere, reductive and challenging artworks in New Zealand art history is a small body of paintings produced by Ralph Hotere in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Generically referred to as the ‘Black Paintings’, these works each share the same square or slightly vertical orientation and are dominated by finely inscribed concentric circles, crosses, rectangles and squares. All are abstract in the purest sense of the word, offering viewers little or no reference outside of their self-contained, hermetic worlds of darkness.

No artist in this country has worked as single-mindedly and extrapolated as much from as limited and demanding means as Ralph Hotere. As David Eggleton has observed, seemingly everything the artist touches turns to black. All of the paintings from this body of work are conceived primarily in matte black, only occasionally punctuated by a perfectly inscribed line, more often than not in red. Port Chalmers Painting No. 2 has none of the immediately seductive allure of the near-contemporaneous brolite lacquer works. This is, without doubt, a cerebral painting of the highest order, painted for quiet contemplation and consideration.

Port Chalmers Painting No. 2 adheres to the stylistic status quo of this period and offers no elixir for the time poor or impatient; rather, like the gradually shifting tides, it creeps up on you slowly but surely, washing over and through you in a gentle tide of darkness. The infinite blackness is disturbed only by the subtlest gradations of darkness, whereby the background black gives way to a square shape of inkier black which mimics the perimeters of the painterly field, and a horizontal block at the bottom of the painting. The latter, along with the title, providing a landscape and biographical context and locating the painting in the environment of his new home on the Otago Peninsula.

Whilst the geometric motifs Hotere utilised at this time feature prominently in the modernist vernacular of the 1960s, most notably in the work of Kenneth Noland and Ad Reinhardt, Hotere’s concerns are entirely different from his lofty American forbears. Starting with the ‘Human Rights’ series of paintings earlier in the 1960s, Hotere’s on-going project increasingly reflected his interest in producing abstract paintings which have their genesis in universal issues of war, human suffering and oppression, the nuclear arms race, and the degradation of the natural environment. It is one of the enduring complexities of the artist’s project that his preoccupation with the human condition is most often expressed in the reductive formal language of late modernism.

Painted three years after the artist moved to Dunedin to take up the Frances Hodgkins fellowship, Ralph Hotere’s Port Chalmers Painting No. 2 appears as both resolutely of the local and the international in its concerns and is a deeply intellectual and refined painting. Its esteemed provenance of having previously been owned by John Caselberg, who himself had moved to Dunedin to take up the Burns Fellowship earlier in the decade, further cements its place in the rich cultural milieu of 1970s New Zealand.