Massive jigsaws that traverse time and space are the latest mind-blowing creations from artist Zac Langdon-Pole.
He talks to Lynn Freeman about the connection between 19th Century paintings, and today's exploration deep into space.
An image of space from the James Webb telescope Photo: AFP
“These new images we’re seeing from the James Webb telescope, they obviously are themselves sublime and stunning, but they’re composed of lots of data points, in a sense they’re interpretations of data and of grey-scale, infra-red images,” Langdon-Pole says.
NASA calls the colour pallete they work with the Hubble Palette, he says in reference to sublime landscape paintings from the 19th Century.
Langdon-Pole uses reproductions of some of these sublime works himself, to challenge the assumption that the images are grand and beautiful.
“In some ways the kind of fictions of them.
“There is obviously a huge and immense and great science involved in what NASA has done to produce these images in the first place but ultimately to get them what they say is press-ready, to kind of make the maximum impact within culture, they have attuned this pallet to ones that we already know.”
Within a history of image making, the sublime landscape paintings live in our collective subconscious, he says.
“I think that’s a really fascinating part of the history of some of these images. When you scratch beneath the surface of one thing, not only the depths of space but also the history of image making in general, and of art, there’s all these quite beautiful connections.”
Langdon-Pole has been working with jigsaws since early on in the pandemic, when he noticed his nephew’s Where’s Wally puzzle had universal dye cuts – you could put puzzle pieces together from different pictures.
“It became this quite beautiful medium for me to think about what images might go together or belong, or not belong together because of course they fit perfectly within these dye cuts.”
What became of that were large scale collages, new works made from the reproductions of great works and images from the James Webb and Hubble telescopes.
It sits within a history of 20th Century New Zealand painters, he says, who were interpreting images from Europe from black and white reproductions in magazines and Ben Day dots. “It forms part of the language of interpretation of culture.”
“Of course, jigsaw puzzles are this kind of kitsch museum gift shop thing that signals to me the reproduction of a lot of these grandmasters from Europe. It’s a medium of translation.”
Zac Langdon-Pole's exhibition Porous World opens on Friday October 14 at the Michael Lett Gallery in Tamaki Mākaurau.
