In his new body of work, Laurence Berry continues exploring his dual obsessions of thinking about and representing the land that he belongs to.

Over the past year he has constructed a series of paintings of New Zealand’s large and not-so-large urban centres, which he has overloaded with every kind of reference, mark and emotion. The works have so many visual hooks that you are bound to be caught, or caught out, by at least one of them. Berry is a painter who works within a set of formal constraints of the medium of painting, yet continually sets out to challenge both himself and viewers.

The paintings are landscapes in the sense that they are paintings about places. While Berry has jumped for the iconic landmarks of the towns and cities, he has absolutely eschewed the shorthand of the picturesque. New Zealand is not 100% pure. Towns and cities are direct products of the process of colonisation. History can get buried in cities, buried by “civilisation” and “progress”. Berry does not attempt to peel back time, politics, events, opinions, grievances or triumphs. But, through the inclusion of a significant mountain or peak, he grounds and titles each painting. Importantly, these timeless geological features are identified by their original Maori names.

Instead of researching local histories in libraries, in the new works it feels like Berry has found a cupboard stuffed with a lifetime’s worth of papers, comics, songs, events, movies, talkback radio shows, villains, heroes and emotions. In reality, Google and YouTube have functioned as invaluable archives from which Berry has collected, recollected, and delighted in, low-res versions of every kind of material.

Berry explores notions of land value, access, ownership, experience and responsibility. There is a suggestion that the scrawled tags, so beautifully rendered in oil paint down to the last drip, are not the only illegitimate acts to have occurred here. In his diatribe on tagging, Hamish Keith declares that “there is no desire greater than a brute instinct to make territorial marks”. This statement can be borrowed and recontextualised as a cogent description of the impulse of colonisers to name all they can map.

- from Reaching Capacity by Cathy Tuato'o Ross, published in Art New Zealand, Number 133, Autumn 2010