Construction no. 4

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

In the late 1970s Geoff Thornley moved away from painting in its conventional form to begin a series of investigations that instead explored its fundamental elements — surface, edge and plane. The abstract ‘Constructions’ that occurred as a result and dominated his practice for almost a decade have become some of his most distinctive works.

While the large scale and colour selection in works like Construction no. 4 were intuitive, the process of making was intricate, precise and labour intensive. Not previously a painter who sketched prior to working on canvas, Thornley found that with the ‘Constructions’ he had to plan and arrange on a small scale, first on paper, then in maquette form, until he had an arrangement that he felt could operate as a finished whole. Each work was then carefully assembled from canvas-covered wooden boards prepared with gesso, providing the surface with a porous quality — in this pure state Thornley refers to them as ‘perfectly pearl-like things’.1 But as a painter Thornley’s application of colour was key, and the ‘Constructions’ demonstrate his masterful use of colour relationships.

In Construction no.4, carefully selected colours emphasise the depth of the layers and crisply define the shapes. The work is weighted at the top, yet perfectly balanced. Hard edges and rigid straight lines compress and contain, while painterly surface, visible brushstrokes and harmony of colour have a softening effect. Indeed the ‘Constructions’ abound with tension — between form and structure, object and space, line and colour. As Allan Smith has observed, they are ‘complex formations which augment tensions at every point’ which he likens to ‘braced frames, wedged corners, battered walls, obstacles to vision’.2 As structures, the ‘Constructions’ push away from the surface of the wall, but are still bound to it, so blurring the line between painting and object.

Lizzie Baikie

1 William McAloon with Geoff Thornley, Geoff Thornley: Constructions 1978–82, National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, Auckland, 2007, p. 35.

2 Allan Smith, ‘Star forts and specialism, or Geoff Thornley’s work with an impossible and non-compliant real’, in ibid., p. 13.