Notions is a solo presentation of paintings by Tāmaki Makaurau based artist Campbell Patterson. Accumulative brushstrokes produce painted surfaces, ones which bear the traces of repeated instances of revisitation and revision. Many of these artworks are the result of a task-based approach to painting, one that is also testament to the sometimes reluctant passage of time.

In selected works, looping, continuous lines are formed from reserves, or sinuous areas which have been left unpainted. The application of layers of oil paint is dictated by numbers taken from units of time, for example 12 or 24 hours in a day, or seven days in a week. Clocks, diaries and calendars provide parameters for building up painted surfaces as part of an idiosyncratic, yet rules-based approach. This deliberately slow and painstaking method of painting was designed by the artist to expend maximum labour, extending over multiple days and across many different moods and states of mind. Some were even painted with a broken arm.

Patterson proposes art-making as a pre-text or alibi, it is merely one of the possible ways one might expend time or even attempt to make it quicken. The painted surfaces presented to viewers map prior acts of labour, exertion, boredom, repetition and extended duration. Time that is measured and time that slips away...

ends for leaving / ends for staying, a sound composition by Patterson extends his concerns with temporality. The piece punctuates the silence of the gallery with a playlist of selected endings from random songs, sudden interruptions that operate like one-liner jokes tossed out with insouciance, only to crash and burn.

This is Patterson's eighth solo exhibition at Michael Lett.

Press release courtesy Michael Lett.