Jamie Te Heuheu – Days of Wine and Roses

Invitation

Installation

Jamie Te Heuheu

Days of Wine and Roses, 2023

oil on canvas, 1049 x 945mm

Jamie Te Heuheu

Dancers in Love (diptych), 2023

oil on canvas, each panel 1240 x 1040mm (framed)

Jamie Te Heuheu

That Old Feeling, 2023

oil on canvas, 1525 x 2030mm (including frame)

Jamie Te Heuheu — Hamish McKay — March 2023

Michael Moore-Jones

Jamie Te Heuheu’s first exhibition at Hamish McKay Gallery, held last year, was called “In a Sentimental Mood” after Duke Ellington’s jazz piece. On the one hand, it was a reference to the jazz tradition of spontaneity and experiment, qualities you can see in Te Heuheu’s paintings here with their freewheeling movement and sense of delight. On the other hand, the title acknowledged the reflective mood you have to be in to do minimal, gestural abstraction in the 2020s. To create paintings like this seventy-odd years after Ryman’s monochrome abstractions (many of them jazz-inspired, too), Rothko’s colour fields and Pollock’s swirls needs an awareness of the mood required if you’re going to avoid what some have dubbed “zombie formalism”—abstract artworks that risk being simulacra of the real thing, with little or no connection to art’s arc.

No zombie-ness in these paintings. In the first place, they dance around the room. They are optimistic: a young painter seemingly thrilled to be doing what he’s doing, rifling through art history, national history, and personal history to work out what it’s all about. Walk around the room and you’re jigging to the paintings’ music as Te Heuheu’s lavish paint seems to move on the wall. And in the second place, these three paintings offer up countless prompts. In this country deep, rich colours like those here brings to mind Ralph Hotere’s numerous “black paintings” in which thin lines (very often red) vibrate on a deep- dark ground; and it brings to mind too a series of red drawings Hotere did while in Europe, drawing on Malevich and Kandinsky’s art as he figured out what it meant to be a Māori artist and an activist with a love of the European abstract painting tradition.

There’s McCahon here, too, in his paintings of the sixties as he turned monochrome, influenced by his friend the artist Buster Black (Thomas Pihama). Black and McCahon met in Auckland in 1956 when the former was just twenty-four, taking McCahon’s classes. Black’s paintings of two years later mixed glass, sand, sawdust and paint skins to create textures in the nocturnal landscapes he painted. Black was Te Heuheu’s great uncle—these are art histories, but also personal histories. The textures in these paintings take on multiple meanings, looking in Europe’s direction as well as Mount Ngauruhoe’s, which Black painted with such texture it has been said that “light that streamed and pulsated up and down its flanks while clouds rose from its base.”

These three paintings can be seen in the light of those and many other histories. But in the end, it’s enough to approximate Duke Ellington’s response when asked about the meaning of his jazz: “If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!”.