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society. Both concepts of course are inherently flawed
and paradoxical. Leleisi’uao’s achievement has been
to construct nuanced visual narratives that register
something of these tensions.
He offers acerbic images, autobiography by other
means, paintings with the moral complexity of short
stories, depicting Southside. They are home-grown
examples of capitalist realism from the point of view
of the underclass; the implication being that having
been born free in Samoa, migrants arrive in New
Zealand and are suddenly everywhere in chains:
serfs in a brave new world. This is a provocation
but it makes this artist’s paintings extraordinary
documents, for in studying himself and his
immediate neighbours he has proved an attentive
and observant psychologist. In particular, works
such as Samoan Eyesore (2007), Crashed Presbyterian
(2007) and Lost Kamoans of the Godly and Godless (2007)
capture character using oil paint smeared on as a
kind of corrosive paste, for here are the damaged,
the frustrated, the melancholy, shown exposed as if
flayed. And yet this oil paint has also been oozed onto
the canvas like an ointment or salve for their suffering,
their abjection.
Paintings of migrant workers, from the 1998 Blue
Collar series to the 2004 Tinoua’mea and Pepe series
and Factory Worker (2005) show a workforce eager to
buy into the consumerist myth. But with wind-up
clockwork keys in their backs and plug-in power
sockets in their foreheads to harness their energies, the
implication is they will become drudges, bowed under
by the weight of shift work and drained of personal
agency.
The emphasis on heads with two faces implies the
divided self: a Samoan grappling with being a Kiwi,
caught up in a dualism that invites alienation from
both sides. But Factory Worker (2005), with his sticking
plaster across his mouth, with his clown nose, his
coconut-shell forehead, the red ribbon gift-wrapped
around his head, and yet with an angry glare,
represents a psychological state which on one level
is a disgruntled Samoan guy, but on another level
might be anyone caught up in the grotesque deadpan
comedy of zero-hours contracts in the big city.
The large painting Prince of Mangere (2015),
beautifully rendered, suggests the continued
assimilation of the Pasifikan Other into factory worker
fodder, unto the next generation. Here, however, we
sense the identity parade conveyor belt pausing or
lurching to reveal a more ironically aware character
emerging from the environs of Mangere, like some
youth leader or gang leader, with eyes closed
embodying or enacting contemplation, as if escaping
into self-empowerment. He’s an anti-hero listening to
an inner voice. His handsome physicality—and aura—
is hypnotic, mesmeric. He’s a seraphic misfit: he could
be a latter-day Christian martyr or a factory-floor
revolutionary, or else a knowing digital nomad—and
yet still with the stigma or stigmata of subservience in
his forehead: the sign of the coconut.
The constant motif of the mouth closed with
sticking plaster, or zipped up, or with a cork shoved in
it, shows that as an artist of indignation, passionately
concerned with social ills, social injustices, Leleisi’uao
is not afraid to address community censorship
and transplanted Samoan rules which he sees as
outmoded or hypocritical or just plain wrong. A