Michael Dell - Even Now

A palpable stillness runs through the paintings by Michael Dell in his third solo exhibition with Föenander Gallery. Next to his subtle gradient paintings, Dell’s eerie landscapes are static and unoccupied. Subject and non-subject are rendered with the same meticulous treatment, where the formal distinction between representation and abstraction becomes irrelevant. Dell’s works display a fascination with, but the unwillingness to elevate, the ordinary. In their rejection of drama, an easy narrative, or the fetishisation of the artist’s hand, his enigmatic artworks are more memories than representational landscapes or abstract meditations on form

Dell pays consistent attention to the picture surface through his repeated process of addition and erasure. Fibre and fine irregularities in the linen substrate emerge and draw the eye. Such mark making is not a reduction of painterly gesture to achieve anonymity of the artist, rather, it is a process that cultivates an ambiguity towards the representational subject. Based on locations in the region of the artist’s home in Nelson, Dell’s placid pastoral landscapes bisected with roads feel familiar, though they could also be anywhere or nowhere at all. Behind the worked and muted surfaces the landscape becomes detached from narrative, like a faded memory, unanchored in time.

Dell is both a magician and a surgeon, creating works that are at once intimate and distant. His paintings, with their softened focus they often appear as grainy photographic negatives or worn slides from the middle of the last century. These quiet and monochromatic works appear as degraded relics of a mechanical process but are in fact meticulously created and then eroded away by the artist. The origin of this aesthetic likely lies in Dell’s training as a printmaker. The printmaking process, created to make art and text reproducible, is subverted by Dell through his own manual labour. Dell may strip paint, narrative, and himself from the art, but through this, he creates room for atmosphere

The exhibition’s title 'Even Now' suggests a continuation, without a beginning or an end. It may refer to the cyclical, regenerative state of nature, as separate from and indifferent to the stories we construct around it. Dell’s nature resists personification. He creates a passive and impartial space, where the search for meaning is flattened and challenged by the materiality of the picture surface and the pairing of the pictorial with the abstract. Uniting these works is a quiet tension between surface and subject. Dell’s paintings sit comfortably within this tension, at ease in a representational limbo.

Michael Dell was born on the Banks Peninsula in the South Island of New Zealand. He started his art practice by making works on paper and later graduated from the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in 1994. While in his final year at art school he won the 1993 Cranleigh Barton National Drawing Award. Recently Dell won the 2019 Parkin Drawing Prize, which makes him one of the few artists to win both of this country’s premier drawing awards.

Dell is widely recognised for the particular surface quality of his paintings and has work in a number of public collections, including; Christchurch City Art Gallery, Auckland University, The Suter Gallery, TSB Wallace Arts Trust.