Lorene Taurerewa has lived and worked in New York for the past six months.

In recent years Taurerewa has been making a personal study of the Eastern, or Chinese, tradition of painting, which establishes itself on a concept of space quite different to that of the Western tradition. In Chinese painting the most fundamental concept is that of Void, or Emptiness. The ink marks that go down on the white paper are fullness “dropped in“ to emptiness; they need emptiness the way words need silence.

This sense of purity and stillness of concentrated thought holds strong in Taurerewa’s paintings. Her painting shows us the process of thought trying to find memory – thought becomes focused and dense, emptying out the surrounding space. The human inhabitants of these worlds are isolated between large volumes of space, beside them, behind them and in front of them. They are incomplete; suspended from becoming part of their world; clouded from action in the present by uncertainty, apprehension and vulnerability.

Memory also does not make meanings as our conscious mind would; it forms weird relationships, according to emotion, instinct and sensation. The wit of these paintings is in the tradition of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse, with surreal shifts in scale and role-reversals between human and animal. They also belong to the ancient tradition of Aesop, from the time we shared our world with the animals, lived in close relationship with them and studied their moods, thoughts and personalities, finding in them reflections of our own.

- from an article by Owen Davidson

Review by TJ McNamara in NZHerald click here