This painting was selected by John Furtak, to commemorate and celebrate 25 years of working at The Suter.

Alan Maddox was part of a loose assemblage of New Zealand artists who shared a common bond of pursuit in modern art of a wild and primitive manner, that included the likes of Tony Fomison (1939-1990) and Phil Clairmont (1949-1984).

Using the simplistic motif of ‘X’ in endless permutations I believe that Maddox addressed what the protagonist’s brother in John Lanchester’s novel The Debt To Pleasure (1996) states: “There are only three questions asked in art: Who am I?  And who are you?  And what the *#+^’s going on?”

I don’t know if all Maddox paintings use the ubiquitous ‘X’, but all of the others that I have seen do.  I can go back to this work again and again, and always get a charge from it.  It has nothing to do with beauty, or remembered vistas, but has that elusive, (dare I say it),  X-factor.  And oozes what I consider to be the essence of every artist - vision.

John Furtak