Philip Trusttum - 'New Work'
Canaday Gallery, 13th January–7th February 2010
Children and their toys have been decidedly unfashionable in the world of serious art since Victorian sentimentality met its demise in the late 19th century. Although artists such as Picasso and Paul Klee were pleased to acknowledge their desire to recapture the innocence and intuitive response of the child in the way in which they realised their work, it is difficult to assemble a list of modernist paintings that are specifically located within the world of childhood.
In fact, possibly only Marc Chagall sought to consistently evoke such a universe, even though his work laments more than it celebrates the innocence of childhood. However, as an artist whose practice has been grounded in the best traditions of European modernism, Philip Trusttum has consolidated his reputation in a body of work that 'exposes the artist's enthusiasm for life itself through a compelling expression of the ordinary.' Indeed, Trusttum's oeuvre seems to address and resolve the challenge of Picasso's statement that the difficulty for an artist is to retain something of their childhood in their work. In the mid-1990s, curator and commentator Justin Paton described Trusttum's art, for all the best reasons, as profoundly childlike, or 'seriously playful.'
Since 1999 Trusttum has developed a series of paintings based on the world of his grandson, William, who now lives with his mother in the artist's Christchurch home.
By 2006, however, the figure of William had largely disappeared from these paintings. Yet to assume that he was no longer present in these works would be wrong.
The child's intuitive innocence remained written large in the colourful, painterly images that now made up Trusttum's 'Truck series. And in his most recent work from 2009, the artist's skewed and large-scale vision of William's toys now further compels the gallery visitor to assume William's point of view and consider these objects, up-close and personal, located in an environment, momentarily independent of time and space, and innocently centred upon the absolute importance of colour, shape, line and form. In their titles, 'Look, Look' and 'Pumpkin Look at Me' Trusttum insist that the viewer pays close attention, giving over to the experience of seeing, as though for the first time. And it is the consistency and spirit of such a vision that remains impressive in Trusttum work. In 1989, Peter Leech perfectly summarised the joy of the experience of a Trusttum painting in full force: "There is the glorious carnival whirl of ideas and thoughts as you witness a mind turning excitedly one way, then suddenly taking another surprising direction: an intoxicating tumble of conversation in the way the paintings speak to us."