ARTS MAGAZINE February, 1985.

ENTITY: THE PAINTINGS OF RICHARD KILLEEN. Betty Collings.

Each of Richard Killeen's paintings is an assemblage of pieces: two-dimensional images of animate and inanimate objects, birds, animals, flora, houses, bits of tools and machinery, and the geometrical shapes most used in abstract visual communication (squares, triangles, etc.). Derived from found objects, most images have been refined by techniques of visual conjugation such as inversion, rotation, or topological distortion. These procedures have resulted in changes of color, shape, proportion, symmetry, direction, position and so on. Cut out of thin aluminum sheets, painted in bright colors, each piece is flat, hangs from a single nail, and hugs the wall. The work has a casual appearance due to the fact that the placement of the images within each assemblage is arbitrary. This is deceptive, for the individual images have been thoughtfully developed and then carefully selected to produce a total assemblage that feels and looks coherent. This coherency is not due to recognizable compositional structures; thus the work prompts speculation as to what it is that makes us recognize an entity.

The artist believes that the apparent coherency of his paintings comes from feelings the observer gets from an interplay of internal elements that infers unspecified, intangible relationships of vision and concept. He assumes these feelings to be the result of momentary confluences of idea, logic, development, and variation that are due as much to the life experience of the observer as to the eye, hand, and mind of the painter. He also believes that the extent to which the paintings arouse similar feelings in different viewers is a function of the fact that life's experiences are inevitably communal. Killeen interprets contemporary existence as an imprecise but functionally operative reality constructed by each person from innumerable layers of cross-referenced information. This reality is a meta-physical entity articulated by shades of feeling. The artist distinguishes his concept of feeling from the purity of feeling to which Suprematists aspired and from the gestalts of Minimal art. His meaning embodied in feeling, based on what one might call a "concert of instance," is also distinctly different from the meaning or coherency developed by narrative. Killeen thinks it is similar to the concept of feeling embodied in the paintings of Piet Mondrian. Because he sees life's assortment of particulate elements ever available for combination and recombination into new and compound entities, which are in turn transitory, perceived, and reckoned with in terms of feeling, his views can be allied to the deconstructive principles of Post-Structuralism such as those advocated by critics and writers in the '70's.

The kinds of images this artist chooses and the techniques he uses may in part be due to the circumstances of his life. Killen lives in Auckland, New Zealand, where a temperate climate, fertile soil, and clear air not only further the beauty of nature but make it relentlessly pervasive. The history of western culture in that country is short; 1840 was the date of the Wakefield Settlements, the first planned European invasion. At this time an unequal confrontation between advanced European culture and the physical realities of a geologically young, abundant, hence insistently wild landscape began a national preoccupation with the intricacies of the interaction between man and nature. In the arts, this preoccupation has been a constant in the always strong literary tradition of New Zealand and in the visual arts. These days many of New Zealand's best photographers, sculptors, and conceptualists are active participants in the worldwide ecological movement. For Killeen, the natural and cultural environments seem to have directed his innate impulse to theory toward an artistic interpretation of the ideas of Charles Darwin and to the use of visual communicative techniques that parallel the syntactical conventions of literature. In addition, his professional awareness of avant-garde trends, though muted by distance, is kept fresh by literature and occasional travel. It includes an interest in visual artists like Bochner and literary giants such as Joyce and Pynchon, all of whom are in some way concerned with extending their chosen language to probe or evoke the processes of the intuitive mind.

Going about his routines of daily existence, Killeen lays the groundwork for the carefully developed collections by picking up and storing the appealing images that haphazardly catch his eye. This act of collection is apparently random and unconstrained by preconceptions of subject, shape or color, informally reflects his interest in natural history, folk art, anthropology, and the processes of subconscious thought. Periodically he takes the more elementary examples from his "file" and, via a series of line drawings, subjects them to sequences of intuitively directed topological transformations. Sometimes this is done by an accumulation of minor modifications of detail; at other times wholesale inversions such as mirror imaging are used. On occasion, and as demonstrated by one of the larger units within Pooled Memory, No. 2. the accumulated modifications of simple shape are compacted together and the gross outline redrawn on a fresh surface to form a single new, and unique, shape.

Before starting a new work, the artist sifts through his image bank looking for a bit that has sufficient emotional and formal pull to serve as a nucleus for a painting. Then, working first with cardboard, he selects, modifies, and paints individual images according to intuitively directed permutations of form and concept that "respond to feelings about wanting something." As he thinks that all images are equivalently abstract to the extent that each represents some type of idea; he makes no conscious distinction between the so-called figurative and abstract ones. Each shape is looked at carefully as a thing of and unto itself before a decision is made as to whether to add it to the composition or to put it aside. The process does not stop when a pre-selected number of pieces are present or when a consciously realized selection of categories has been included, but only when the work looks and feels finished. At this point the outlines of the original cardboards are copied onto aluminum, cut out, and repainted. Because it effectively negates well-worn concepts linking touch, process and mind, and takes the shapes a step away from his personal logics, this last procedure probably accentuates feelings of disassociation.

All the works in the Bertha Urdang exhibition contained similar transformational sequences and categories of images that suggest transposition of images between works might be permissible during an installation. The artist insisted, however, that these were like any other painting in that the individual images should not be "muddled up." Furthermore, because his purpose is to examine and show "the differences between things," he would never consciously re-sort them according to categories. To this end the color choices, usually made during the consideration and development of the original cardboard units, but sometimes reviewed during the shift to aluminum, have no compositional function other than to "emphasize the idiosyncratic nature of each image." In the past Killeen's need for variety was not approached by the conscious intervention of difference in the manner of Le Witt, but by the rejection of repetition as and when it occurred. Now that this approach has become conventionalized within his oeuvre, he wants to challenge it by recycling core images. Given that the earlier images were of single objects with simple outlines, painted in one color, to the outsider this process seems fruitful but predictable. Killeen's sequential progress toward internal and external compounding of concept, shape, and color is a continuous increase in formal complexity that follows a common developmental pattern.

In The Origin of the Species (1858), Charles Darwin hypothesized that the various species of plants and animals evolve because the rigors of nature select, from among the many possible and expressed variations of any species, only those with the ability to survive and reproduce. The theory's emphasis upon the role of infinite variations is what kindled Killeen's interest. For Killeen, variation is the non-logical force behind change and development, an artistically pursued construct that connects him not only with Darwinism but with the methodology of Levi-Strauss.

Another extra-art connection is related to Killeen's replacement of conventional compositional devices with random placement. This method posits a perception of totality that is not defined by compositional clues. Such an approach links Killeen's work with the "organizations" of Surrealist Jean Arp, the deconstructed verse of fellow New Zelander Tony Green, and the radical visual experiments of conceptualist filmmaker John Davies. (With guidance from perceptual psychologist Michael Kubovy, Davies makes films that look at the way the mind uses digital compilation in is synthesis of specific information into total constructs.)

Finally, Killeen's whole artistic enterprise appears to evince an interest in uncovering the structure of disorder by rejecting the frame, picking images haphazardly, pursuing their re-combinations intuitively, replacing conventional compositional devices with arbitrary placement, enlisting the prior and unknown experience of the viewer, and so on. Such art has conceptual echoes in the work of mathematicians and physicists like Mitchell Feigenbaum and Roger Rollins whose questions and experiments probe the way that nature, confronted with a plethora of alternatives, selects the most efficient routes to chaos. By so doing they have identified chaos not as complete randomness but as islands of almost predictable disorder within an ordered environment. Killeen's lean and witty compounds of tangentially related shape and form not only show how the concepts of one man may continually form, dissolve and reform, but once again demonstrate art to be one of the effective ways that the culture distributes, refines, assimilates, or rejects new modes of thought.

Betty Collings.