Michael Dell’s artworks display a fascination with, but unwillingness to elevate, the ordinary. In their rejection of drama, an easy narrative, or the fetishisation of the artist’s hand, his enigmatic artworks are more memories than representational landscapes or abstract meditations on form.

In his 1935 essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin wrote

“Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law.”

Dell is both a magician and a surgeon, creating works that are at once intimate and distant. His work is eerie, with their softened focus they often appear as grainy photographic negatives or worn slides from the middle of the last century. These quiet and monochromatic paintings and drawings appear as degraded relics of a mechanical process but are in fact meticulously created and then eroded away by the artist. The origin of this aesthetic likely lies in Dell’s training as a printmaker. The printmaking process, created to make art and text reproducible, is subverted by Dell through his own manual labour.

Toss Woollaston, in his 1962 publication The Faraway Hills, dismissed many artists for “making pictures which can always be recognised by non-painting people as ‘scenery’.” He saw many painters merely transcribing what they saw in nature rather than interrogating the role of landscape in how we live and see the world around us. Even the most abstract of Dell’s work seems to be concealing a world behind their distressed surfaces. He utilizes photographic aesthetics while also obscuring any notion of an objective reality. Dell takes the dullest of ‘scenery’ and transforms it into more than landscape paintings. The places they depict are only important in how ordinary they are. Without any obviously embedded meaning in these landscapes they become ways for Dell to explore the transformational qualities of time, memory and scale in making the mundane significant.

Walter Benjamin was interested in the ways in which the advent of photography called the ‘aura’ of an ‘original’ artwork into question. The ability of an artwork to be reproduced and made accessible to the masses decreased the power of the singular unique object. Dell’s work can be seen as an exploration of this fractured idea of ‘authenticity’ in the twenty-first century. He creates pseudo-mechanical work in a minimalist rejection of surface. He strips away evidence of his hand in the final work but rather than causing them to lose their ‘aura’ he imbues them with it. Their aura is heightened through the subjects he depicts. Appearing as shadows and memories they are either unknowable abstract places or deeply ordinary views of lush landscapes often bisected with empty roads. Michael Dell may strip paint, narrative, and himself from the art, but through this he creates room for atmosphere.

Sarah McClintock
Suter Curator

Michael Dell, Landscape at Moutere, 2017, Acrylic on Linen, 580 x 620mm. On Long Term Loan to The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū Collection