RON LEFT – Recto Verso Series – 29 April-23 May, 2025

A sheet of newspaper lies on the pavement, saturated and translucent from recent rain. The underside bleeds upwards to appear on the surface. Disparate stories and images overlap and interfere with each other. Images and text from the underside appear as latent images; half formed and visible before the page has even been turned. This intervention of the virtually invisible medium of water, though accidental and banal, nevertheless hints at something else going on. Opposite sides of a page are caught in a process of becoming each other, of forming mirror images of themselves. Divergent stories and images meld into each other and the fixed parameters delineating text, image and meaning no longer appear fixed. Water has seeped into the pores of the pages, getting in behind the scenes, dissolving the separation between things. Like some special way of seeing things in their complexity, it dissolves the opacity of surface and separation.

 

  

The RECTO VERSO SERIES has a subtitle: The Nature of Opposites. As much as being abstract paintings, these are paintings about abstract things – the manner in which we construct supposed opposite states: night and day, the visible and the invisible, front and back, the geometric and the organic. I use the analogy of recto and verso for its immediacy, physicality and being loaded with human endeavour and narrative. And yet recto (the right side of a page, the side to be read first and always an odd number), verso (the left side, the reverse side and always an even number) are inseparable parts of a single page. The text flows from one to the next side, they hinge, inseparably together. Recto Verso is a poetic exploration of the construction and nature of opposites. Essentially it presents opposites that don’t stand in opposition to each other but that interact and define each other. Using painting’s processes and vocabulary – opaque and translucent, fixed geometries and fluid gestures, inside and outside the frame – the works develop unified fields that nevertheless are constructed from disparate elements. Thus, the edge is an activated space between two sides or between inside and outside the frame. The edge here is too wide to be a line, too narrow to form an area. It thus becomes an active zone rather than a vacant, dividing space. As a viewer we might enter these works and become engaged in the dynamics of the tension between divergent sensations getting lost in oceanic fields of colour, and a diagrammatic plane of fixed, objective structure that pulls you back to the surface. Falling into translucent dissolving spaces, and dense opaque planes that remind you this is a painting.

   

The surface of several works is split with a dividing hinge. The right and left of this hinge are like mirror images of the other, and yet not quite. The works take a different stance than emblematic abstraction, particularly geometric abstraction. Any geometric structure here is caught in a dynamic interaction with fluid surfaces. As in a text, shifting narratives, improvisations and the unexpected, flow in and around and through the fixed structures of margins, spacing and the predictable. The centralised column sits at the boundary between opposites. We witness, or perhaps become the authors of, the dynamic interaction between states. In these works the margin/edge becomes not an empty space that contains and isolates, but an active (hyper) site. It is an activator, a transformer, where the relationship between the inside and outside of a work becomes visible. As much of a painting lies outside as inside its frame and edges. These abstract states are nevertheless real and actual. The works do not merely present different qualities as juxtapositions. Energy and transmission are the focus, and perhaps the means to enter these states is through abstract, poetic vocabularies.

  

So what is the relationship between these paintings and this writing? Certainly the works do not illustrate or examine the textual ideas. Likewise, this writing does not aim to explain or make sense of the work. Rather, writing is a parallel conceptual exploration. The value of writing in parallel to the development of paintings is that it underpins the work with a critical and mindful intensity. This text is a synthesis of on-going thoughts and writing that have kept company with the production of the paintings over a year and a half. Painting and writing are separate entities, yet they invade, infuse and interfere, in a productive interaction, with each other. The time zone of a painting is so different from the act of reading however. A painting draws the viewer into it, to enter a synthesis of complex dynamics and sensations. It connects with a world outside itself, yet is complete and confined in its own processes and invites us to get lost in its poetics.

   

Tāmaki Makaurau based artist Ron Left has a solid exhibiting career spanning several decades. He is known for his on-going commitment to the reinvention of abstraction and his sensitivity to materials. The connection between the poetics of painting and philosophical ideas is of particular interest to him. After many years involvement in Art and Design at AUT, and completing a PhD in 2016, Ron Left returned to full-time painting in 2019.