PROVENANCE Robert May, Dunedin Private Collection, Auckland

EXHIBITED Ralph Hotere (1963-1973), Robert McDougall Art Gallery, 3 May - 26 May 1974 Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland

Everything Hotere touches turns to black, wrote David Eggleton in Ralph Hotere: Black Light (Te Papa Press, 2000) and he went on: all the objects he makes, all the shapes he renders, all the colours he finds are freaked with jet ... Hotere makes black provide elegant riddles, fastidious conundrums (p. 62). These remarks apply aptly to Hotere's Black Painting (1971), a large, imposing and mysterious painting on canvas which because of the extreme subtlety and delicacy of its colouring and texture - difficult to render photographically - needs to be seen in the flesh, so to speak, to be fully perceived and understood. Of course this is true to a degree of any painting, certainly of any painting by Hotere, but is especially so in works like this which depends on such slight variables of lighting and distance and angle of viewing for its subtleties of form, texture and colour to be appreciated.

To provide some context for this unique painting: the title Black Painting first becomes prominent in Hotere's work in the late 1960s soon after his return from Europe. At first, 1968 paintings of this name employed glossy black lacquer or enamel on hardboard, glass or perspex, buffed to a highly polished surface and with contrasting vertical and horizontal lines of different colours transecting the surface, or, alternatively, narrow, coloured circles to contrast with the reflective, black, immaculate surfaces. In 1969 the year Hotere was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at The University of Otago, he moved to Dunedin, and changes occur in the Black Paintings series. Hotere begins using acrylic on canvas as a medium, as in, for example, the 1969 painting in Christchurch Art Gallery in which numerous concentric circles in different colours are inscribed on a matte black surface. In 1970 he introduces words into black-on-black paintings with the extensive Malady series, utilising a poem by Bill Manhire.

This particular painting from 1970-71, inscribed for Robert (that is, Robert May, a Dunedin actor) is a one-off ... , belonging with a number of such miscellaneous individual pieces in which he explores variations on his usual motifs and techniques. Hotere often depends on strong contrasts of colour or form to make his effects - intersecting coloured lines or circles against polished black surfaces, for example, or splashes of white paint against rough corrugated iron. But in this painting strong contrast is almost entirely avoided, with one exception. Close to the top of the painting a thin red line runs horizontally across the surface but stops short of each edge. It serves largely to divide the painting into two zones, both dark-coloured but subtly and recognisably different in tone. At the bottom of the picture two precise dark triangles serve a similar function of dividing the space into areas slightly contrasted in texture and tone.

Within the central zone of the picture, marked off from the rest at top and bottom in the manner described, a large perfect circle is faintly inscribed. Often in Hotere's paintings such circles (a recurrent motif) stand out clearly, marked by sharp colour contrast, but not here; the rim of the circle is indistinct, not sharply defined, and is observable mainly by the difference in colour and texture between what is inside the circle and what is outside it. Inside, an informal all-over pattern of scribbled short, parallel marks or strokes in a variety of subdued colours - black, brown, purple - is discernible, somewhat reminiscent of kiwi feathers on a cloak, an effect unlike anything I have ever seen on a Hotere painting before. Again, the effect is not emphatic or bold but subtle, restrained and inscrutable, adding to the sombre but appealing enigma of this uniquely remarkable work.

PETER SIMPSON