UP THERE

UP THERE

Hamish Tocher's Entombment
in the group show Stations of the Cross

Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, 12 - 24 March 2008

Heaven's an interesting concept. It's a natural consequence of considering the brevity of earthly existence and wondering Is that all? The bad news may be Yes, but for those more hopeful a further question arises: just where is it? Traditional theology claim's it's a state not a place, but from time immemorial the hunch has been that it's somewhere up there. Earth-bound humans, subject to the laws of gravity, have looked skywards longingly, envying the freedom of birds, constructing angelic metaphors giving themselves hope for wings and investing limitless blue with the nomenclature "the heavens".

As crude as it may seem, practically every culture privileges up over down - from Babylon to Haight Ashbury - and the history of art, being the handmaiden of culture, mirrors this relentlessly. Take a look. The uppest of the up, though, just has to be Giambattista Tiepolo, the 18th century Venetian painter who in his command of ceilings makes James Cameron look like a Muppet, Peter Jackson the Teletubby of illusion.

Denied the space of film, Tiepolo worked within the physical limitations of the ceiling. Pressing down: showing up. In our irrepressible age - where the sky's the limit - it's hard to grapple with the 18th century idea of restraint. Not some puritanical notion of denial, it was a canny acceptance of the power of form: how a structure might permit liberation. (Tiepolo's not usually associated with restraint, but we're talking form here, not content.) No-one was kidded it wasn't a ceiling, but everyone was seduced by the power of its suggestion. Tiepolo ruled, OK?

Modernism's earnest project couldn't abide Tiepolo. His florid escapism seemed fatally mired in all that illusion, all that religion, all that pink. Even the pale blues paled. But Tiepolo's work was the visual equivalent of the trumpet: clear, assured and triumphant, qualities that Postmodernism can tolerate alongside its eager quest to fathom the depths of illusion, the religious and the pink.

Hamish Tocher's of a generation seemingly aware of all this. Free of Modernism's cult of originality, appropriation's second nature to these guys. "To be honest" isn't just a sound bite here, and acknowledging whakapapa isn't just an indigenous privilege either. History's no longer the bunk as described by Henry Ford - that apostle of modernity who didn't prattle on Marinetti-like about speed: he made cars that went.

Tocher's emerged in the last few years as a fleet-footed exponent of juxtaposing and layering found images that breathe new life into sometimes very familiar imagery, often reconstructing famous paintings by collaging figures and stuff from fashion and other magazines then re-photographing them. As with Tony Fomison's "copy" of Holbein's 1521 Christ in the Tomb it's tempting to feel they may be much more interesting than the originals. It's impossible, for instance, to look at Caravaggio's Doubting Thomas without viewing it through the lens of Tocher's version once seen. As a child of Modernism with Jewish ancestry he sure has a compelling if unlikely take on traditional Christian iconography.

Recently he's raised his sights and has been monkeying around with light projection. A logical development, in hindsight, given his interest in trapping us into seeing (or mis-taking) things through transparent layering. Add light to that transparency and you're off. To date his work's been of modest dimensions, deriving primarily from the physical size of the books he's worked from, but with this huge ceiling work at the Gus Fisher he's made a leap of scale that's breath-taking in its audacity and awesome in its success.

The group show's "about" the traditional Catholic sequence of episodes known as the Stations of the Cross, and Tocher's piece Entombment both celebrates and reinvents the final, 14th, act in this drama. While the concept clearly shows a debt to Tiepolo, Tocher's restraint is not just formal but extends to the content too: the image is so stripped back it's as if Piero della Francesca had taken to the sky. Stripped back, of course, is what happened to Christ at the 10th Station, and the next appearance of a garment in this story is the winding sheet/shroud in the 14th. The image of this cloth is the one thing this Tocher work has in common with every other Entombment ever depicted.

Tocher's startling innovation - unique, as far as one can tell - is to view the scene from the grave position of the dead Christ. He's dead, right, so what kind of seeing is going on here? Is the artist suggesting, as conspiracy theorists and sceptics have done for centuries, that the Master has just conked out and will come to in a couple of days, or is he pre-figuring the Resurrection in some way? Anyway, moving right along....

The winding sheet appears at the far end, spread out and hovering in mid-air, echoing the net cast by the fishermen apostles earlier in the Gospel narratives. Here it's been thrown by a rough semi-circle of six figures dressed in contemporary casual clothing, their footwear closest to Christ/us as if they were standing on a sheet of glass, this imagined layer echoing too the artist's earlier use of mylar and again suggesting a transparency capable of supporting solid weight.

This imaginative re/construction so sharpens the perspective and so updates the story that it's, well, up there with Tiepolo, da Cortona, Correggio and the Gandolfi. No kidding. What's more, the seemingly redundant art of ceiling painting has received surprising refreshment with this photographic project. Bring on those cameras and lights. Whichever way you look at it, Hamish Tocher's taken photography to new heights