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heplayedgrowingup.Forexample,heoftentakes
the lay-out of his paintings—their grid format, their
optical patterning—as much from board games
(Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, chess), or jigsaw
puzzles, crossword puzzles, building blocks, the
Rubik’s Cube, as from the modernist grid and tapa
cloth design. The English language for the Samoan
migrant, especially idiomatic New Zealand English,
is often a barrier or an alienating divide. The Samoan
alphabet omits a number of letters, and consequently
those for whom English is a second language often
mispronounce certain words. So in Leleisi’uao’s
symbol-system the Rubik’s Cube displays letters
representing a language game to be mastered, which
feeds into the cryptic and hybrid titles of many of his
artworks.
In one room at the Pah Homestead, four fairly
large 2015 paintings are butted together with an
oomph to make an impressive mural, to emphasise
their metaphorical allusiveness, because The Quixotic
Bishop, The Intrepid King, The Enlightened Castle and The
Grounded Knight all represent chess pieces caught up
in a deadly endgame. They are the emblematic heads
of four endangered species of mammals set against
a sea of warmly coloured pixels, and in this stagnant
ocean drifts the ever-proliferating jellyfish.
Another rich source of imagery that this
artist repurposes in Kamoan Mine derives from
merchandised toys made for blockbuster science-
fiction movies and TV cartoon shows, from Spielberg’s
E.T. to The Simpsons. Diminutive plastic figurines
are turned into the antagonists and protagonists of
psychodramas by being painted brown, or else left
white, and placed on miniature plinths made from
that Pacific Island staple, the corned beef can. Thus
weighty issues are smartly shrunk as if to fit into the
palm of the hand and the results arranged along a
Pah Homestead mantelpiece ready to have their
meanings laboriously teased out by post-colonial
theorists.
Leleisi’uao’s painterly imagination is protean: he
can find inspiration in shapes of puddles on the road
while just walking along. In both Tesiname (2010) and
Pasauta (2010), his X-ray vision shows us the interiors
of giant compendious heads. Each head is horned,
splotchy, phantasmal, and surrounded by spectres.
Reminiscent of Rorschach inkblots to a degree, they
might be showing the inner mind of a fire-and-
brimstone-fearing sinner or a modern-day psychiatric
patient, one tormented by imps of perversity. Look
closely and you’ll see not angels blowing trumpets
but devils tootling clarinets impudently while fellow
devils cavort.
These brooding balloon heads, each shrouded by a
kind of deformed nimbus or atmospheric halo, offer a
distant visual echo of the moai, or Rapa Nui ancestor
heads, that inform the silhouettes of anthropomorphic
rocks in other paintings, such as The Ufological Island
of Samoa Triptych (2008), one of a number of more
recent paintings set in a utopian Moana or Oceania
and made up of busy island scenes in blazing colours.
Here, the cargo cult messiahs have finally arrived
with all the goods you might need for community
betterment and collective activity. Such works with
their hallucinatory acid visions of an alternative
Polynesian Paradise show Leleisi’uao devising and
painting his own Promised Land: a prelapsarian,
polytheistic Samoa. Retelling origin stories, the artist
completes the circle with added sky-borne blimps, or
steampunk dirigibles, and lofted planets that resemble
otherworldly roundels—glowing concentric rings.
Amid the razzle-dazzle patterning, flocks of birds
hover in the sky like pointillist flickers to spell words
in the Samoan language. Below them are villages and
crowded sports fields where the inhabitants engage in
quirky pastimes, such as moa racing.
Folkloric, syncretic, animistic, in Harmonic People
(2017), a two-part painting which won the 2017
Paramount Wallace Art Trust Award, Leleisi’uao’s
graphic invention reaches a kind of apotheosis as
he absorbs and incorporates visual elements from
civilisations past and present—totemic Polynesian
petroglyphs, Aboriginal sand drawings, ancient
Etruscan pottery, Trajan’s column, Aztec codices,
Egyptian tomb decoration, the Bayeux tapestry,
French comic books, NASA ideograms—to celebrate
with his own cosmological expansiveness the rhythms
of human industry, the rituals of humanity.(below) Andy Leleisi’uao’s Kamoan Mine at TSB Wallace Arts Centre
Pah Homestead, Auckland, May 2019, with from left Portrait of an
Immigrant (2012), Blue Collar Series Part I (1998) & Blue Collar Series
Part II (1998)
(Photograph: Julian Zeman/Turama Photography)