Kate, Carissa, Gabrielle, Grace, Ella, Marie, Charity, Bianca, Bridget and Helen: 10 young, long-haired women, each framed separately in a different part of (what we learn is) the same landscape. They are standing or sitting, half posed, half lost in their own thoughts: waiting, feeling, remembering, dreaming, wondering… Present and blank at the same time; vacant and introspective.

Each figure in Andrew Barns-Graham’s recent paintings displays an awkward quietude that could pass for aloofness or equally, anonymity. As we stand before these works, each about a metre high and therefore the figures in them approaching life-size, we might wonder whether we have stumbled across the women; or are they plucked from a look-book for us to browse through? Do they offer themselves, mannequin-like, or do we intrude? Wondering about what links these figures is encouraged by the fact that they are shown occupying different locations within the one watery landscape. The landscape is painted in a delicate hand, with light and rapid brush-strokes, and is mapped in an explanatory sheet which accompanied the exhibition. It seems as imaginary or real as the women; and is reminiscent of the idealised settings of 18th century society portraits: especially such paintings as Thomas Gainsborough’s Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1785-86) and Mary, Countess Howe (c.1760). Like Gainsborough’s portraits which meld the imaginary with verisimilitude, Barns-Graham’s contemporary women balance tantalisingly on the cusp of the made-up and the believable: posed, expressionless, blank; and yet also present and vulnerable.

Barns-Graham came to painting first through working in advertising and graphic design; and then through studies at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Art. He was first interested in mining the suggestive possibilities of imagery composed from magazine photo shoots. With their model-like figures and styled interiors and architectural settings, the early works presented themselves as half-written scenes waiting for us to invent connections, motives and actions. The subjects and compositions were varied and seemed rather happenstance. Therefore, while individual paintings offered the viewer plenty of scope to be inventive with character and drama, collectively, when viewed series by series, the paintings were disparate. Barns-Graham realised that the jump-cutting that works in a magazine’s montage of editorials, photo-shoots and advertisements can become a liability in painting. Recently he started to try to find his way afresh. His latest series of paintings – The Passage Between – is evidence that he has begun to succeed in creating convincing linkages between each work.

Barns-Graham has faced down the issue that his earlier works were too conceptually disconnected, though their aesthetic was coherent and convincing. The lack of connection between one painting and the next allowed his figures to tend towards cut-out characters without a plot or script, and displaced any possibility that they might convey a convincing authenticity or depth. Partly this risk attends any painting derived from photographic sources wherein there is already a flattening of character, space and time. Barns-Graham’s images were flattened in the same way that all media images interpose a fog of unknowing between us, the viewer, and the original subject of the photograph. The ‘unknowings’ are various: from not knowing the original contexts of the subject, to not knowing, in this era when the manipulated photograph is ubiquitous, whether the subject ever really existed in that form, place or expression at all.

However, in his latest Auckland exhibition, Barns-Graham has found a way to utilise the generic blankness of his media-sourced subjects by weaving threads of character, motive, expression and context across and through the series of images, painting by painting. Now more firmly characters, his subjects seem haunted by narrative possibilities rather than just being open to almost any speculation.

The thread he has drawn between the works is delicate though. His glamour-book heroines continue to be of a certain type – wan, aloof and styled like studio mannequins – but now Barns-Graham has created an imaginary landscape as the unifying mise en scène. The figures are disposed within a single landscape of lakes, forests, clearings and rivers, which suggests they share the same back-story and may be subject to similar psychological forces. Located in this shared imaginary space, but without any indication of interaction between them, what they seem to share is a guarded introspection – they seem wary. Perhaps they are symbols of an atomised individuality, expressing the loneliness of people unable to make meaningful connection even in a crowd. The series’ latent literary character confers on the women depth and authenticity; albeit the authenticity of being alone in the company of others.

I find myself wondering if the landscape is responsible for animating the women’s blankness as introspection. The idea that this is a landscape of literary fantasy – a landscape of possibilities and mysteries – is suggested by the map which accompanied the exhibition of the paintings. It is a hand-drawn aerial view of lakes, rivers, forested hills and a shoreline; and of a genre we are familiar with through countless children’s and fantasy novels in the manner of C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien. But this landscape is not populated with talking animals, mysterious caves, craggy mountain peaks, bogs or monsters. It is quietly mysterious.

It is the quietness of the landscape, with its shaded and obstructed vistas that leaves room for the imagination to sense untold secrets and impending drama.

Stitching together a literary landscape is an important manoeuvre for an artist who wishes to mine the territory of the blank or evacuated look in what are ostensibly portraits of his subjects. Why? Because the suggestion of a theme creates context, which creates in turn the opportunity for character and thus the potential for interaction and drama, whether by projection, transference or other flights of fanciful imagination.

Several times I have referred to the blankness of these women. In fact I think they belong to a contemporary genre of the blank portrait with their evacuated looks. How? First, there are portraits of people we know – these have an immediacy that is largely the result of our intimate projections (for people we really know) or our inferences (for people we think we know). This knowing we experience when we look at the portrait grounds our experience of the portrait somewhere in our own lives and memories and feelings – that is, outside the art work itself.

‘Blank’ portraits are a genre that has at least two important characteristics. First, we recognise them to be, most likely, images of someone, though we may not know whom, or have a name, or have this supposition confirmed. They appear to us a someone rather than as ‘some type’ or an invention. Secondly, they are presented sufficiently devoid of context, activity and/or overt emotional expression that we cannot explain them ‘in action’ or as part of an event or circumstance. They seem just to be there: inactive; passive; appearing as if all their presence – their physical and psychic energy – is turned inwards; held within themselves. Failing to project their ‘personalities’ outwards to us through expression or action, these figures draw our attention into them. We don’t know who they are; we don’t especially know what they’re doing; and we can’t tell what they’re thinking or feeling. But they are somehow convincing as themselves, whatever that might be. They are portraits, even though we draw a blank when we try to connect. As such they make us try to work it out… They make us try to connect with them as if we were to know them. They invite us to imagine.

A very well-known example of an artist who works in this genre is Vanessa Beecroft. Beecroft photographs models. More accurately, she photographs highly staged installations of groups of models, typically in art galleries. To say Beecroft photographs ‘models’ is both accurate and deceptive. Rather, she photographs people in such a way as to infer they are models, subjects who can be treated as a type, as an anonymous type, as ciphers: to be dressed, undressed, wigged, made up, and positioned. She takes groups of mainly women, and displays them in galleries, rooms, even on shelves, in clusters, groups, and rows. But it is exactly in this manner of reducing the sitters to a type – they all wear the same colour wig; or they are all undressed down to the same style of skin colour tights and pale plain panties – that their subtle differences of type, their individual facial features and body shapes and skin colours mark them out, not as models, but as individuals, and possibly not as models at all. Thus she plays with the idea of the portrait within a photographic form reminiscent of fashion shoots in which the subject is typically an anonymous prop rather than someone. Beecroft makes group non-portraits that remind us of portraits. While they don’t give us much sense of the expressive individuality of the sitters, they remind us of their individuality.

The manner of Beecroft’s photographs is to refer to the genre of the fashion plate, to borrow from, but to mess with its conventions. The photos are bad copies of the original form and thereby they let something through that is entirely anti-fashion: the ordinary, awkward individuality of the sitters, and their laconic state of drifting off into space. Beecroft’s sitters look as if they are waiting; marking time. They may be bored, they may not, but the point is when we look at the photographs we are invited to imagine we are connecting with them as people in a contrived situation.

Another artist, whose photographs belong to the same genre of the blank portrait, is the young German photographer Wolfram Hahn. Hahn recently undertook a project (A Disenchanted Playroom 2006) where he photographed children between the ages of 3 and 12 watching television. With his camera positioned almost directly in front of each child, he has framed just their head and shoulders against a neutral background. Positioned in almost the same place as the TV set they watch, Hahn has waited until each child has become so completely absorbed in the television images in front of them that they appear to have slipped into an expressionless trance. They are there, but not there. Present, but blank, as if their personality and energy has gone into limbo.

Barns-Graham’s figures have some of the character of Beecroft’s works, reminding us of models – generic and at the same time individual – and of Hahn’s subjects absorbed (in something) and expressionless. Most gaze out of the frame, directly at us or just past us. Only two focus somewhere else. Ella, seen from a low angle, who seems to gaze off to a far horizon over our heads while she holds a pole with a flag rippling in the wind belongs more to the genre of heroic allegory; and Maria seen close up, turns her head and casts her yes down, as if she is listening to something we cannot see or hear. It is Maria’s backward glance that betrays the landscape’s quiet secrets and brings us back to speculating what might connect these ten women.