Jack Trolove: Thresholding

For this show the artist up-ends his painting practice, leaning away from the dynamics of a white box gallery, and into the black box of theatre. This new work, created for Pātaka, is crepuscular. It’s about the worlds that exist in thresholds like twilight and grief. Jack makes large-scale gestural paintings that he thinks of as second skins for us to feel through. From swathes of oil paint, in thick lumps and thin stretches, enormous faces appear and recede simultaneously. His mark-making techniques mimic the abstracting processes we experience when we’re ‘falling apart’ with grief, or melting with pleasure “those threshold times when our bodies remember how to shapeshift”.

Jack paints from his studio on the beautiful muddy waters of the Kaipara, in rural Te Tai Tokerau. His work explores embodiment and liminality, the politics and poetics of transition and other states of in-between-ness. A practicing artist for over twenty years, he shows both nationally and internationally, in public spaces, artist run projects and dealer galleries. In a recent Art New Zealand review, he was described as 'a painter of substance and a virtuoso manipulator of paint'.

WEST GALLERY