Chris Heaphy’s new exhibition is full of sentient beings – birds and heads, eyes left, patient and waiting. Colours are rich and sonorous – sponged, poured and squeegeed behind vessels and feathers poised in a painterly ground.

One painting is cool and dark, but titled with a gentle yearning, You’re Somehow Always Here. Heaphy is part Ngai-Tahu, and this painting with its Maori head, emerald greens and striations of teal, speaks of the flowing glacial rivers of Te Wai Pounamu the South Island. This feels like a pounamu painting with whakapapa to Waitaha and Arahura. It is also a contemporary history painting layered with paint sometimes quiet, but more often turbulent and almost seismic in its rhythms and agitation. The greens and blacks are hauntingly and achingly beautiful. The head could be blindfolded but there is company – Heaphy’s familiar lexicon including a female figure in dress, a piano, a dog and others. Guardians these (spiritual, floral and animal) to a future. Like the whakatauki “ka mua, ka muri”, Heaphy’s paintings suggest a looking backwards into the future, with eyes fixed on the past.
JS