Posted By: New Zealand Herald - 06 Apr, 2013
"Despite the title, Sienna Palette, the Paintings by Mark Cross at the Pierre Peeters Gallery are tightly governed by the concern for a magic realism. One part is given over to landscapes such as Dry Gulch where the brown of folding hills seems to be a darker version of the prevailing drought.
"The realism goes further than that, inviting speculation without being explicit. Cross has done a number of paintings based on the rocky landscape of Niue.
" His virtuoso realism comes into play in representing rippling transparent water. A notable example is Swimming in Cyan Champaign, where a woman swims in deep blue water with the surface above her, very cleverly realised. The Tuna Years shows a young woman sitting on rocks looking at the ripples on the clear water with a glass buoy in netting floating clear in the water. We can only speculate that this has floated clear from a tuna boat offshore.
" Not all the work has this layering of meaning. Some is simply illustrational. Yet one uncomplicated painting, which shows the head of a thoughtful bearded man alone on a wide sea with an infinite horizon beyond him, has a symbolic force that encourages speculation about him and what looms beyond that horizon"
"Despite the title, Sienna Palette, the Paintings by Mark Cross at the Pierre Peeters Gallery are tightly governed by the concern for a magic reali...
The devastation of Niue by Cyclone Heta in January last year sparked a change of course for painter Mark Cross, a long-time resident of the island. After more than a de...
It was in April 2001 while viewing the masterpiece, ‘Tangaloa’ in a local private collection that I was first introduced to Mark Cross. Indeed this was an honora...