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In a recent conversation, Rohan Wealleans accidentally pronounced the word 'malevolent' as 'male-violent'. It was an apt malapropism for an artist who has regular accusations of misogyny hurled at his sexually charged work. Yet his is a democratic assault on taste — seemingly evoking (and provoking)  as many 'isms' (sex, race)  as possible. Wealleans is a white man whose work behaves badly in a climate of correction, and in doing so makes us think about the question of permission. He's also a maximalist with an orgiastic approach to materials, breathing new possibilities into the age-old problem of what to do with paint ...

Wealleans's particular brand of sexually aggressive imagery comes coupled with an equally exuberant formalism and an investigation of the plasticity and physicality of paint. To the moon and back was created utilising Wealleans's trademark technique of layering coats of house paint (Resene's 'Lumbersider')  and cutting, stripping and pinning back into the form to expose intricate strata of colour. Like an archaeologist he excavates for us the inner workings of that most surface of materials: paint. In Wealleans's work the paint is not just facade but also serves as ground and structure. The paint is the point.

The artist's treatment of materials is relentlessly, restlessly innovative. Simultaneously modelling (building up)  and carving (extracting) , his method, despite its dimensionality, remains as much a discussion about the history and context of painting as about a concern with sculpture – connecting half a century back to Lucio Fontana's cuts to canvas. Wealleans himself describes his process as 'painting on something that's not flat',while curator Justin Paton has suggested that he renders 'the most familiar of art forms – newly alien and odd' ...

Wealleans has honed a unique form of fictional indigeneity which places his position as a Pakeha, or white New Zealander, under scrutiny. Wealleans's sources are enthusiastically catholic in taste, spanning Africa, Polynesia and the Americas in their reach. Dreamcatchers, Aboriginal dot paintings, hula skirts; this is ethnic by way of hippie handcrafts and the hardware store. Wealleans's faux Pacific island features himself as chief – an unlikely, posturing deity surrounded by attractive handmaidens and a variety of cultural artefacts. There's a cringing, self-deprecating quality to this work in which Wealleans (not exactly your classic pin-up)  elevates himself at the same time as he sends himself up. A white man playing a black man poses a challenge which begs questions of authenticity, power and authority. Reviewing Wealleans's work in 2004, critic Tessa Laird wrote: 'The sin of appropriation, as committed by Picasso, Gauguin, et al., is here reappraised and perhaps resuscitated.' It is murky, fraught terrain, but Wealleans, who says he is 'interested in how the look of a culture is formed', insists his position is clear, pointedly stating: 'New Zealand's a Pacific island and I'm from here. I have a right to tell those kind of stories.'

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2009 issue.