Glenn Heenan is a painter based in Tāmaki Makaurau whose work explores the zone between realist representation and abstraction. Heenan studied painting at Unitec, Auckland under Richard Fahey. In his final year he was invited by Te Arawa Master Carver Dr Lyonel Grant to assist in painting the kōwhaiwhai for the newly commissioned Te Noho Kotahitanga Marae on Unitec’s campus; a rare opportunity for a Pākehā art student.

“My paintings come from images sourced from the everyday”, he writes, “but I want to disrupt their potential readings […] My aim isn’t to paint a thing. Instead I am always attempting to glimpse and paint the space between a slowed-down moment and something about to occur [ …]  The crucial part of my practice is that the painting somehow finds itself, distilled into its own singular statement.”

Writer Becky Hemus suggests that “… the painters Heenan returns to reveal clues in his methodology. In conversation he refers to Jasper Johns, who said that a painting should be not a deliberate statement but a helpless one — what you cannot avoid saying, rather than what you might set out to say. Heenan, too, is careful to try to remove the ego when painting. Rather than tugging at marks that might be beautiful, or moments that might be technically brilliant, he asks the harder question of whether these elements serve the work as a whole. He paints to music, his own mixes and soundtracks curated from years of collecting and spinning vinyl. Part of what he is building in the studio is a total environment that generates its own flow.

When titling his works, Heenan jots down phrases that snag his interest — a mood, a social register, a small absurdity that captures an in-between space that finds its way in. He has little interest in capturing something literally, which is partly why he resists working in series. But the titles do locate the work in a world of people with bodies and social lives and murky days in their topsy-turvy states. Post Biological Optimism. If It Moves Keep It. Privileged and Protesting. They are wry and a little sideways, like ice cream on a Monday — an off-schedule pleasure that makes you wonder why you ever waited for the weekend.

Photography: Sam Hartnett