Artist remains ‘on message’

THE content of Bill Riley’s new exhibition came as somewhat of a surprise — even to him.
Featuring pieces from as far back as 2000, the installation has been designed as kind of a survey show to introduce Gisborne viewers to the artist and his work.
And to find some of those pieces, Riley had to dig deep in the basement of his Auckland home, shipping off works that had been under wraps for years.
“Before I went through it all I barely even knew what was down there,” he laughed. “It was a very, very interesting exercise.”
But, he says, it was not an uncomfortable experience. In fact, he was pleasantly surprised at how cohesively his work had held together over the last decade.
“It is useful to look back at how your practice has evolved and it helps put it all into perspective,” he said. “Though to be honest, I was surprised at the consistency of the messages.”
Those “messages” include ideas about the environment, the value of community, modern cultures and social structures, says Riley, who has had a few experiences of those structures of his own.
Born in England, his father’s job in the British Navy took his family to far-flung posts in places like Malta and the West Indies, before they settled in Australia in the 1970s.
He trained in fine arts but, disillusioned with the Melbourne art scene of the 1980s, moved to New Zealand to run his brother’s Auckland restaurant. Then it went bust, and the artist-cum-restaurateur found himself living in his car.
“Suddenly, I found myself making art again,” he says. “At the end of the day it was something I just couldn’t keep away from.”
Riley divides his energy between his work as a lecturer at the Manukau Institute of Technology and making his own art. And it is the “making” that he says is all important.
“As an artist you are constantly questioning what it is that you do, what it is that you contribute to society, and I guess one thing you have to contribute is the sheer amount of labour that goes into making art,” he said.
As such, the process of “making” is revealed in much of the work on show in the Gisborne exhibition.
Using glass as a backing for works from the early 2000s shows the different layers of paint as they gleam through the reflective surface.
In pieces from three or four years later the artist made collages out of portions of “cast” paint, made by pouring paint onto sheets of glass, letting it dry and peeling off the resulting sheets.
Fast forward another four years, and Riley devised a work in which thousands of painted pieces of cardboard are stacked in the gallery to create a sculptural form.
And when the artist travelled down from Auckland to install the show, he brought with him countless plastic containers packed with the hundreds of folded penguin figures that, now unfolded, march in triangular formation across the gallery floor.
That, he says, is an overt display of his labour — the hundreds of hours it took to manufacture those hundreds of little figures.
But it’s not all about the making, there is also the message. Gelato-coloured hubcaps are the artist’s reference to contemporary boy racer culture. Painted works of meticulously masked horizontal lines form optical illusions that position the audience as the most important factor — that is, Riley is saying, humans matter. Those marching penguins? They talk about society, community, safety (and strength) in numbers.
While Riley has used techniques from origami to sculpture to digital photography, he is a painter by preference and, he says, will always go back to that.
In fact, he already has . . . the newest works in the installation are bold, colourful depictions of just how many ways one man can use a brush.
In one series, one hundred tiny canvases — each only about 120 millimetres square — are arranged at the base of the wall, forming a colourful kind of skirting board that illustrates the multiple tongues in which a painter speaks. In another, he heightens the effect by exploring the same process in a larger format. And in the newest work, his prism-like painting draws on a social networking diagram that explores humans, how they work and the hidden relationships between them.
“Looking over what is assembled here, there is certainly a consistent message about us as humans, how we need to make the world work in a human way and how we can do that together,” he says.
“I guess that is what I want my art to offer . . . a human experience, rather than a static one.”
■ Bill Riley’s exhibition The Gentleman’s Hour will be on show at PaulNache until December 30.