The paintings of Richard Killeen
notes towards hanging a killeen cut-out
In twentieth century art the simplest ideas (Mondrian's masking tape, Morandi's bottles, Pollock's paint dribbled through the bottom of a can...) are those in the end that turn out to be the most intellectually demanding, those from which maker and viewer get the most mileage. The premise of New Zealand painter, Richard Killeen, is simple: to paint or produce images on pieces of cut-out aluminium, each provided with a hanging hole. These pieces can then be hung in a cluster according to the preferences of the purchaser/spectator/curator 'so that the painting is more democratic and less hierarchical' (Killeen). At first, in the late 1970s, Killeen produced literal and painstakingly cut-out shapes of insects and geometric forms lacquered in car paint. Later these cut-out shapes became larger and thinner, with riveted additions and they no longer slavishly followed the outlines of their forms. More recently he has produced a series of works on jewellery tags that use ready-made holes. When one appreciates the entirety of his work over the last thirty years, as is possible in this impressive retrospective, one understands that Killeen has always been engaged in 'cutting out': his early realist work is full of cut-outs (its suburban figures are pasted against a background of interiors or landscapes); his chance paintings of the early 1970s involve the placement of selected shapes on board; and his abstract 'comb' pattern paintings of the late 1970s derive from the technique of stencilling.
It is precisely by a shifting of perspectives that we establish something's reality. Killeen's work sees things in terms of other things, it collects things together, in all those dictionary meanings of collection: to