David Cauchi’s work straddles the line between cartooning and painting, using a diagrammatic line-and-wash style to create quirky, ironic statements. His works often involve self-portraiture, satire and allegory. These emblematic, often cryptic images nevertheless have an implied narrative, which comments on art history, cultural foibles and the artist’s personal experiences, imbued with his trademark dark humour.

Cauchi is concerned with the playful and absurd in art and describes himself as an ‘inter-temporal avant-garde artist.’ He asks questions about the artist’s role within society, which is at once invested in the art world and institutions that support him, yet also exists outside and indeed rallies against this social cushioning.

These drawings function almost as pictographs – the clarity of the ideas being matched by the economical means of expression. Here he depicts a traditional device called a plagiograph used for duplicating or plagiarising paintings by recording key coordinates. This tool is a type of pantograph, which is used for copying where the copied version can be made larger or smaller than the original. Pantograph Punch is the name of a popular website publishing art critiques and reviews. In the corresponding work Everything-that-is Cauchi is subtly suggesting that everything is bananas.

Cauchi (b. 1970, Auckland) lives and works in Wellington and completed a Master of Fine Arts from Massey University, Wellington in 2012. The title of his thesis is A strange book of incomprehensible nonsense: Or how I became an intertemporal avant-garde artist and went completely batshit insane. His work is held in the Wallace Arts Trust Collection, Auckland and he regularly exhibits in both Wellington and Auckland.