"A show for my friends“ Tao Wells' first dealer show.

http://artbash.co.nz/forums/reviews/a-show-for-my-friends-tao-wells-at-the-aaron-laurence-gallery

Aggressive Narcissism

Byron the Bulb

Title: Free

Horizon + Horizon

tape plane

a volumes relation to the void

she knows

Performance still from Boarder Decision

Cricket Bat

I saw it too

I saw Tao standing in a T-shirt that said 'sale' (which is french for 'filthy', I think), outside Aaronlawrence, shouting something about a branding exercise. Lured by the sense if not the understanding of this pretext, I went inside. At first, I was captivated by the plumbing, but then I spotted the exhibition, the leering red Freud-face before me, his mephistophelian beard unmistakeable in this, the last of ten paintings, begun with off-sick yellowbrowns and moving through a series by which Tao had sought a slowly surer form and arrived at this, undoubtedly Freud, peering like some intricate joke from the redness (which yet retained some of its unfirmness). I laughed and said that I enjoyed art with a sense of humour, but Tao seemed bemused. It was, I suppose, late in the day.

Woodwork on the floor never really seduces me, but the Maratrushka plastic bag ensemble wired to a blackboard seemed to pretty well summarise something unspeakable about the availablity of education to the masses, reminding me of an immage I once had of the Otago university commerce department as an immense, three-year under-sea tunnel from which, once you emerge, you grab a handful of appropriate bullet-pointed pamphlets ...

I'm sorry that my memory is fading now. I remember the teen magazines pasted to inclined boards, and ... oh yes! The layered monopoly universe. Brilliant. But the small flaps he'd cut into the boards, so that one might move from one to the other (from Mayfair, of course), were shut. The possibility of transendance thus removed.

Why Tao, why?