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Text originally created for Michael Parekowhai, Colin McCahon, Jim Allen exhibition at Te Papa, August - September 2012.
Colin McCahon was preoccupied by the threat of nuclear war. Here, he depicts the moment of impact – an explosion turning the sky a fiery red. Below, we see the outcome – darkness and smoky grey rubble. The word ‘ash’ recalls President Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech about the possibility of nuclear war: ‘the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth’.
The painting is named after Piet Mondrian, a pioneering abstract artist who posed a crucial question for Colin McCahon: Where to from abstraction?
McCahon believed that the answer lay not in more refinement but in ‘more involvement in the human situation’. For him, art needed a message. ‘Painting,’ he wrote, ‘can be a potent way of talking.’