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I first started thinking of paint as a weighty physical material at the end of my first year at Art School. In preparation for the final exhibitions, everything received a frenzied application of white acrylic to banish the year’s smears and splatters and ‘gallerise’ the institution. This was an annual procedure; the school shrank year by year, its rooms dwindling, diminishing minutely with every thick and gloopy layer of smoothing, redeeming, neutralising white paint.
Auckland artist Rohan Wealleans’ work realises just this bulk; the skins of his works drip with layer upon layer of bright acrylic housepaint. His paintings and sculptures use paint not so much as a medium, but as a substance, a material. The heavy, layered coats get whittled and carved, sliced back and pasted together again with yet more paint. There is an object in Wealleans studio that is a kind of totem to his methodology. Years ago, it started life as a speck of paint. Thousands of coats later, it is a lump the size of a kid’s inflatable beach ball, bubbling with surface accretions and heavy as a cannonball.
There is a weird beauty about Wealleans’ works, with their orifices and oozings, their often lurid colours, their strange mix of the chemical and the natural. Grown layer by layer, they have something of the quality of tree rings or coral or toenails, but their slightly rubbery, slick and highly coloured surfaces are definitely industrial. While Wealleans romances the idea of the organic (one of a series of hanging sculptures is called Disciple of the Pearl), he reconciles it with the synthetic by describing his creations as natural extensions of alien worlds—abundant but potentially dangerous... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline