Sam FOLEY The Green Belt By Richard Reeve
Replicating the civic plan of many British municipalities, Dunedin is banded by a region of native vegetation, the Green Belt, which forms the focus of painter Sam Foley’s present exhibition. In its profusion of epiphytes, ferns and trunks it resembles nothing so much as the temperate rainforest of old New Zealand.
Foley’s often hallucinatory, perspective-driven paintings witness enduring tension between this primordiality and the pragmatism that has rendered it into an amenity. While the painter’s interest in detail is obvious, his canvases typically capture a primary struggle of basic forces: the linearity exemplified by a walking path or road runs against foliage, a street lamp fights off the encroaching darkness of the canopy, or stairways direct the viewer onward through a crowd of branches. It would be wrong to presume clear-cut references to isolated issues or themes in the elements of his paintings, but symbolist influences are certainly at work. Foley’s oil-paint canvases attest a wrestling match between civic strategy and the intransigent chaos of the natural world.
Still, it must be said that nature in The Green Belt is no longer that threatening, having been substantially forced to submit to the designs of engineers and surveyors. There is ironic, even comfortable, detachment in many canvases: in Foley’s realism we are told to take charge, self-consciously undergo the mental act of feeling privileged to observe this phenomenological gathering, perhaps put our privilege to use (make art?). Path down Queen’s Drive, exemplary of this manipulation, insists on the epistemological play-ground available to us all, emphasising the steepness of the path’s descent through bush and how this steepness leads us to re-characterise the foliage from a depth-perspective. A blink and suddenly we are not quite in the tree-tops. Yet any such fleeting suspension of belief is a game—a snapshot from the corner of the eye—absorbed into the narrative continuum as the viewer emerges once more among the houses of suburbia.
It is hard to avoid extrapolating on the significance of illumination in Foley’s paintings. Benighted clearings, tar-seal lit by a suspended bulb and limned by the forest, look like philosophical assertions made by the painter about the deeply contextual, existential geographies we move in. More than merely the method by which colour and tone are commonly justified, street lamps invoke a sense of transcendental, though not necessarily deific, guidance, leading the viewer along a tortuous path which they promise will eventually break out into the open. Without those trusty plasticated, fluorescent bulbs¾and by distant implication the sun that refracts through Foley’s daylight foliage¾the opening which each canvas presents wouldn’t exist.
Where, or what, is humanity in this littoral of concrete and root? The evidence is everywhere, yet there are few human figures in Foley’s paintings, and where people do appear they are often alien or removed. The faint glow of a cigarette or joint, viewed in Queen’s Drive through the dark windscreen of a parked car, suggests quiet anxiety, a slightly uncomfortable intrusion on someone else’s privacy, as much as the dark warm interior of the car itself. Foley’s journey is a strictly one-person affair; the perspective suggested is expressly that revealed to ‘me’, not ‘us’. And ‘you’, him, she are ultimately points of negotiation, intrusions of the reality beyond the Green Belt on the private view presented by each painting.
Foley is an accomplished craftsman, at home with photographic realism, yet many of his most enjoyable paintings for me are those where the fluency with which detail merges invokes a sense of final distance, lostness, as if the painting itself is merely part of a lightless vortex of decaying memory-fragments. Queens Drive off Braid Rd epitomises this union of the craftman’s precision and the artist’s emotional expressiveness. There is movement in the picture: an impressive accumulation of brushstrokes flings light across foliage, lawn and road. Indeed, fragmented light is a marvellous, secret, hopeless joy to the ostensible viewer, who, if the mysterious boughs are any indication, may be slightly intoxicated and solipsistic.
A region of contrasts, the Green Belt is neither entirely urban reality nor uninterrupted wilderness, light nor dark, yet the exhibition itself insinuates its intractable, context-structured reality as a zone of transit and ephemerality. And perhaps this intractable ‘is’ is how Foley ultimately justifies his persistence with realism in the face of modern photography; the replication of features and contexts in paint draws attention to a knowing that underscores this gathering within the canvas. And this knowing, which much photography cannot convey, is what the fuss has always been all about.
The Green Belt
To go ‘left’, that is, to pass there as
every morning, and hear, no religion
but some camaraderie of birdsong.
The city below, snuffling through
undergrowth. I listen, and many a time
have been half in love with rotted twigs.
New Zealand breaking out of the tar.
And then Cargill, severing the mist.
