Rupert Travis - Indiscreet Tourist

Rupert Travis is a New Zealand-born artist who resides in Ōtautahi Christchurch. His work explores parallels between medium, materiality and subject matter, his compositions engage a mix of collected memories and image, breaking up everyday scenes and reconstructing them within a lyrical dreamscape. By linking suggested narrative to the application of paint, each work sits between the illusion of the scene it depicts and the reality of its flat surface.

Indiscreet Tourist is a response to moments and oddities that catch our attention as we travel, observations that otherwise might go unnoticed by locals. Rupert’s recent practice has typically drawn inspiration from local surroundings and defamiliarised what is ‘familiar’ – taking the time to appreciate what we regularly see but rarely notice. This new body of work – painted in the South of France (Montpellier) over a period of 8 months – is a continuation of this theme, focusing more specifically on how we process and interpret the ‘unfamiliar’. As tourists and flâneur’s, we are often drawn to things that would otherwise be overlooked by locals or conversely we overlook familiar aspects in our own landscape. Rupert’s new series contains a repertoire of intimate moments and curious observations, from his travels; like the experience of watching a local drink water from a fountain (Reservoir) or his encounter with an endemic Kea in Singapore’s Jurong Park (Rare Bird).

Rupert’s paintings are seductive in both their painterly gesture and use of narrative, touching on the strangeness – and sometimes absurdity – of the everyday. The compositions are largely comprised from images and encounters, brought together with personal memories, of his time in Montpellier. While many of the paintings are pictorial in appearance, they are also concerned with the evocative potential of paint. The interplay of tone, texture, surface and painterly suggestion, conjure a sense of the elusive ‘constructed space’, where form is obscured, ambiguous and open to interpretation. Several works in this series have become abstracted in the process, resembling mysterious or theatrical dreamscapes. As such, they omit detail and information lost to memory, instead focusing on a point of interest: a moment shared between figures or the use of colour as a suggestive tool. As a result, many of the paintings embody a sense of the surreal, with their dreamlike setting and unexpected shifts of tone and texture, allowing the coupling of painterly suggestion and narrative be explored.

This process led approach to painting, permits the images to shift between the real and imaginary, where the once recognisable departure points come unfixed, giving way to expressive brushstrokes and layers of pigment. The resulting paintings are subconsciously composed tableaux, which remove themselves from time and place, inviting the viewer to explore a liminal space that is at once familiar and unfamiliar.

In a way, these re-imagined moments are a documentation of self, hinting at broader narratives and making connections to painters of the past, (Odilon Redon and Bonnard) but/while always touching on the strangeness and poignancy of the ordinary.