When you observe the work of Belinda Mason you need to take a moment to understand what it is that you are seeing, like the world coming into focus…but it does not. The paintings are elusive, colour invades your senses, but is subtle. Unlike the painters of sensational light, the Impressionists, these works proffer more in that the observable moment of the painting that is somewhat becoming, developing. If you just look long enough the object will dematerialise into something else, the depiction of something quite non-specific. It’s like having a conversation with a great aunt, there is a wealth of information, familial knowledge, but they will give up only parts of the story, what they want you to know or think that you will benefit from, which leads to assumptions and withdrawals on your part, until a delicate map is woven. It is like that for me when I look at and converse with the paintings of Belinda Mason. 

I say converse with knowingly, as have had the pleasure of watching these paintings develop over time in the studio, where I was Belinda’s co-supervisor during her undergraduate degree, and this suite of works, First Light, is her first solo exhibition. The paintings on show, for me, challenge us to observe how the pictorial and the abstract can converge to present a range of things that acknowledge much of the past of paintings history but not be subservient to it. They are not overtly academic, this is not a slight, quite the contrary as they are bound in, and form a definite historical loop, drawing on the painterly engagement with colour, surface, material and painterly touch whilst constructively seducing the eye to make sense of the object of intention.

It is of no secret that painting sits on a threshold of describing a world often invisible to the viewer but made up of the very things that the viewer acknowledges and uses in their everydayness. What I mean here is that it is the painter’s position to re-evaluate and re-present the things of their time in an often-predefined pictorial space, to nudge, compose, develop and present (in an aesthetic way) something of a contested pictorial coherence, to steal an idea from writer and art historian Ed Hanfling. They attempt to tell a story, but that is not the termination of, nor the intention of the work. There is a deep observation, a kind of material sublime at work here, a romantic embrace of the way paintings make you feel when seeing them. 

Painting now, and for some time, has been in the process of, and qualification of, image making under the shadow of photography. That is half of what is at play here in these works. Mason is an observer, partial to the recognisable but open to the emotional powers of painting. These works could be seen as botanical studies, albeit stripped of the need for a scientific description. Rather, they oscillate between biomorphic forms, consistent with a higher organisational strategy only to diffuse into unrecognisable resting moments, to return the eye to the form of them. They could be seen as strict compositional formats, somewhat formulaic, but they are far from. Yes, they utilise the mechanics of the photographic format and celebrate the completeness of the rectangular frame, but where photography and the photographic image challenged paintings critical capacity to represent, and in turn its place and value, here it is offered as a potential for painting to invest in the mechanism of photography’s indexical quality, and then saturate and seduce. 

Painters now, who chose to depict, have to deal with in some way, not only the dominance of photography in its capacity to represent, but also with the subsequent obverse, the tradition of the abstract, which seems on the whole to have turned away from this undertaking entirely. Mason questions and probes these problems, and in this complex and nuanced dance between the somewhat polemic binary of abstraction, representation, and pictorial value are unravelled. 

The polemic, of abstraction and representation, is really a simple definition. A categorisation of what painting can do, definitions that have been given to it as an outcome in the history of the medium. However, the ubiquity of the photographic image as a reference to a kind of visual representation of a reality is a very real and present hurdle that painters have to constantly consider, whether it is central to their practice or not, and where there is a fluidity that draws attention to the way that painters arrive at what the painting is. In Mason’s body of work there is a direct but subtle attention placed on this trajectory. The title of the show alludes to this. It references in part, both the process of light falling on the photographically charged sensor or plate, and at the same time that moment when form becomes object when illuminated from the darkness, either at the beginning of the day or by some artificial illumination of some hidden quarter to the visual sensation of the eye. Mason makes use of these references, hinging or anchoring the approach to the work in something understandable, the domestic, the floral. A historical trope chosen to undermine the importance of a kind of monumental abstraction.

In all this though, I feel that the central motif is of the coming into view, or finding a focus in the deeply toned paintings. The surfaces, worked up in what seems like progressive occlusions of some warmer or brighter, saturated view of a carefully selected composition of garden flowers, are then treated to a soft glow. This glow traverses the need for a constant or articulated narrative, and the blurring effect gives over to a meditative and slow formal response to the infinite moment of being, just being, releasing its secrets and knowledges slowly.

First Light - Wave Project Space: Ōtepoti - January 2023

Words by Michael Greaves - January 2023.

Michael Greaves is Principal Lecturer in Painting at the Dunedin School of Art, College of Creative Practice and Enterprise, Te Maru Pūmanawa, at Otago Polytechnic: Te Pūkenga. His work explores the problematic position and description of the binary between representation and abstraction ascribed to the history of painting, and the act of mis-remembering as a strategy. He exhibits both nationally and internationally, most recently in Melbourne at Five Walls Gallery in November of 2022 and upcoming in Auckland at Melanie Roger Gallery in February of 2023.