Biography

Tony de Lautour has lived in Christchurch for most of his life. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (majoring in sculpture) from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1988 and in 1995, just one year after his first solo exhibition, he won the Visa Gold Art Award. De Lautour is renowned for his quirky artworks, full of dark humour. The paintings from his first solo exhibition, Bad White Art, were deliberately naive and included imagery reminiscent of the seedy side of prison and gang life - drugs, syringes, tattoos of skulls and the violence of knives and guns as he challenged the definition of high art by bringing these images from the street into the gallery space.

Badlands, title inscribed, signed and dated 2001, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 960 x 940mm

De Lautour works often appear to be exploring national identity, he borrows the popular perception of the New Zealand landscape as a clean green utopia and uses it as a means to highlight how the landscape has been exploited as a tool for colonisation and the presence of commercialism in New Zealand. De Lautours revisionist series is composed of reworked landscape paintings that he found in second-hand shops or garage sales; the paintings De Lautour selected to re-work were traditional oil paintings of idealised New Zealand landscapes, landscapes that were painted in European genres to familiarise New Zealand and make it appear appealing to colonisers of this unfamiliar land. De Lautour then populated these landscapes with beer-drinking, weapon-toting kiwis, brawling British lions, cigarette-smoking snakes and general paraphernalia.

De Lautours Logo Land series also incorporates the New Zealand landscape and in this series it is used to compose well-known symbols and logos of prominent corporations. Badlands, 2001 is from this Logo Land series and in this work New Zealand mountainscapes, which have references to the page numbers from the atlas that was used, form the logo of an Apple Mac. These logo land works merge the visual language of early colonial mapping and the contemporary global brand into compelling imagery with a subversive commentary.

Literature:

Mightier Than The Sword, New Zealand Listener, Tessa Laird, 19th Sept 1998; p 38-39
Art New Zealand, Summer 2003, Andrew Paul Wood, p63

05-Mar-09

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