Judy Millar is one of New Zealand’s most experienced mid-career abstractionists. She rose in prominence in the mid-nineties through a series of vertical paintings that featured delicate bamboo-like horizontal marks, created through the precise removal of organic lines of paint. This interest in subtraction (or ‘unpainting’) as a painting method, is now regarded as a characteristic of her practice. In her current method of working Millar mixes into her process vigorous movement so that the remaining traces provide dramatic as well as contemplative pleasures.

You could say she makes canvases that treat the mind as a muscle to be pushed, chopped and squeezed by the process she uses to create forms. These frenzied and seemingly unrestrained marks have properties that create directional empathy as the viewer’s eye follows them across, and up and down the picture plane.

Millar usually begins their production with brushed on areas of thin chromatic underpainting. She then adds darker sections of colour over the top to provide the main compositional impetus to the work. This second stage begins with the entire surface being recoated and angular portions removed with a squeegee or, as earlier, parts of her palm or fingers. Spatial depth is created by advancing or receding slashes of colour contained within these shapes. The dark areas can be angular, zig-zaggy and complex or, as in earlier works, rolling, swirling and ribbonlike, with parallel rivulets caused by dragging fingers. It is this method that generates a sort of muscular empathy where the traces of her arm movements, wrist flicks and wipes encourage a sympathetic mental movement. The marks are imaginatively ridden like a skier racing down a dipping and rising slope.

This active process, a mental recreating of the marking under and unmarking over of the canvases means it is impossible to contemplate them as simply static compositions. They agitate the muscles of the mind so thought moves within the contingencies of an imagined process.

This motion Millar often pushes out further towards the viewer with her gallery installations, where she explores a baroque sensibility by letting her swirling forms enter the non-illusionist world. Here she deliberately confounds the modernist conventions of the white cube by placing her paintings on unanticipated screens, hoarding-like frames or false walls, so they advance into the gallery space and confront the viewer. The ‘volume’ of the hitherto ‘quiet’ or ‘passive’ work when conventionally placed on a white wall is cranked up within this revitalised zone. The predictable gallery architecture is disrupted and the chromatic spatial qualities of her palette made literal as an assertive, very physical experience. John Hurrell

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