Orange on black

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Blackness is a key feature in the work of Ralph Hotere. It can be partially traced to his fascination with gloominess in Rembrandt’s painting and also has iconic importance in the formation of his tribe’s identity. Te Aupōuri, the far northern people to which he belonged, changed their name after they escaped from danger under the cover of a pall of black smoke. Orange on black, like a number of Hotere’s works of the late 1960s in the same minimalist style, is also relatively close in appearance to the black paintings of American minimalist Ad Reinhardt, dating between 1954 and 1967. Painted the year after Reinhardt died, Hotere’s black painting is, in part, a tribute both to Reinhardt’s philosophy and to the severely restricted palette the artist admired throughout his career.

Comparing work by Hotere and Reinhardt is helpful in clarifying the particular type of abstraction we find in Orange on black. Both works involve an extremely limited palette. Unlike Reinhardt, though, Hotere has no desire to completely purge his painting of content or geometric or symbolic relationships. He does not wish to frustrate the viewer or to force them to spend extensive time trying to understand the work. In Reinhardt’s black paintings a cross form, comprising nine perfect squares in three different colours within a sixty-by-sixty-inch canvas, is barely discernible. Its low-contrast presence, on the very edge of perception, requires serious time and patience to discern.

By contrast the finely masked orange line in Orange on black is immediately readable as a cross on black ground. And while Reinhardt’s cross has bars of equal length, the vertical line in Hotere’s orange cross is longer than its horizontal counterpart and therefore has spiritually evocative associations. In the broader range of work by Hotere featuring the cross, the motif is used in many different ways: as a target, as an anti-war statement and as a Catholic symbol. Reinhardt’s vision was radical, brushless, subjectless and even emotionless, but for Hotere art functions as a humanitarian voice of protest and a window to the soul.

Rangihīroa Panoho