A metaphor that likens subversive cultural forms which penetrate the mainstream to viruses is an obvious one to describe the work of the New Zealand artist Graham Fletcher. Since 1998, the themes of cultural marginalisation and the complex, ongoing relations between the colonised and the colonisers of Pacific nations have pervaded Fletcher’s work. As it infects its target by locating and attacking points of existing dis-ease and political weakness, Fletcher’s viral practice assails the body of European colonialism from the inside. Viruses moreover constitute the subjects of many of Fletcher’s best-known paintings, where these metaphors for cultural intervention are literalised on his diseased painted surface. However, in important ways Fletcher’s work also exceeds the limits of this viral terminology which, problematically, implies a one-way relation of infection from one discrete entity to another. Fletcher’s artistic practice can equally be characterised by its mutability and resistance to such limits. Constantly reworking and blending diverse visual forms, it is precisely its hybridity that makes Fletcher’s work so highly infectious.
Reflecting his mixed European and Samoan heritage, Fletcher’s hybrid aesthetic incorporates modernist abstraction, lava lava designs, tapa cloth, appropriated European art historical iconography and medical imaging of various molecular structures. This Auckland artist’s interest in hybridity is evident in his 1999 series, Mistints—a collection of small paintings that comment on the intermixing or ‘tinting’ of Pacific and European peoples and cultures. Although some paintings resemble a formal modernist grid and others recall tropical frangipani flowers, they are brought together by the leftover oddments of ‘mistinted’ enamel with which they are all painted. These strong and discordant colour combinations and abstracted frangipanis also appear in Fletcher’s Stigma paintings of 1999 that are... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline