These are the New Zealand homes of the fifties and sixties, and they have retreated from their former glory in to the pastiche that is the 21st century landscape.

In Jon Tootill’s latest exhibition 'Homelands' at milford galleries auckland, the houses are outlined in graphic planes of descriptive colour that do not necessarily locate these houses in the past, but more likely within the realm of the ideal or unattainable, perhaps akin to a dreamlike ideal (and that is increasingly the status of home ownership for many).

However, these are scenes that are familiar to the Kiwi audience’s experience of home, house, and landscape within the suburban context that reaches from the 1950s to the 1970s and beyond. You may or may not have lived 'here' but the kiwi vernacular of the architecture and the razed sight of subdivided land, conveys a quirky narrative about our suburbs across several decades.

Tootill’s primarily monochromatic use of colour, extends the idea of the great Kiwi family empire: each is different and yet the same. The use of the planes of colour works to separate one ‘empire’ from the next, and yet each painting of a dwelling or place is unified by a sameness of treatment.

Separation that clings to conformity is a Pakeha New Zealander’s ideal, and sometimes by way of a reminder or visual pun, Tootill describes the dwellings or landscapes against a sky where clouds take on the shape of Maori motifs: and he creates a long white (cloud) shape that makes the house look like a toy house and certainly ephemeral.

Advertising and design comply to sell sell sell, and Tootill's planes of emotive colour work on us much the same way as a road side billboard might: with quick and subliminal information conveyed through key use of colour and stylisation of detail.

Tootill was formerly a creative director at Saatchi and Saatchi. There is a sophisticated and informative (graphic) design ethic in his paintings. The emphatic commentaries in the exhibition are about the commodification of land and home, and land and home as objects of desire. The notion of (Maori/European) aspects of tribalism are described too, and Tootill plays with these themes to a witty end.

In this exhibition, Jon Tootill has incorporated a couple of works that do not feature houses for example On The Line From Kakapuka (2004). This painting is a celebration of homely cosiness and irony, and adds value to ideas about colonisation and the homeowners dream that are at play throughout the exhibition. The title 'Homelands' suggests that home is the land as much as it is the building, and Tootill has projected these ideas into the New Zealand landscape.