Orexart is delighted to present one of Australia's most celebrated contemporary painters, Angela Brennan. The colourful works in this exhibition, her first solo New Zealand show, explore her infatuation with the old and classical, specifically epic tales of 'The Iliad'.

Brennan brings a philospher's perspective to her work, she is an artist who isn't afraid to see the connectedness of things, to let her visual creations speak of her values, ethics, loves. This is an artist shaped by modernism, yes, but also charmed by linguistics, sensuous by inclination, cerebral by nature, and as her best friends say simply, and pleasurably, 'funny'. Brennan's latest paintings take the 'pleasure principle' to new heights, they sit upon hilltops like temples to the gods of wisdom, beauty and passion.

Infatuated by the old and the classical, as Brennan is, these are paintings that 'travel', as if travel was a place of the heart and mind, where the endless scatterings of history lie before us in fields of wonder, sunlit, resting, quietly abandoned, adorned, and honeyed as ripe figs of summer.

 

Are these paintings then, like 'The Iliad' from which their titles come, best described as 'a way of talking about human life rather than a description of the truth?' Perhaps so, but Angela Brennan's art has sometimes also seemed like a teenage diary, a 'travelogue' of the emotions, sometmes raw, sometimes sweet, sometimes aching with simmering passions. But these paintings are not the product of an untrained eye, nor the hesitant hand, these are gems, subtle, quiet, restrained, complex and polished. These works call us like sirens to the shores of experience.

Brennan's art seems as full of life as Aristotle's summation of all human actions and their causes; chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion and desire. And as Plato said, "At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet." There is a lot to love in these paintings, a lot of passion, a lot of reason, a lot of poetry.