A detailed look at what moves us

Picnic by Joon Hee Park at the Orexart Gallery. Photo / Supplied

Fine detail or dash and drip? In contemporary art anything goes. Yet a precise style can disarm passion and a raw, spontaneous style can rob us of context.

The precise, highly detailed and highly finished painting of Joon-Hee Park at Oedipus Rex creates landscapes within which the artist depicts herself acting out her dreams. In her surreal world, images have the precision of dream, an interior dream irrationally fantastical and rising from the subconscious.

The first painting in the show is Daydream, where the artist with her dark hair and wide eyes is bowed down by a great pile of toys on the top of her head. The toys are soft toys - bears and monkeys - and yet they bear heavily on the young girl. There are dark lines under those wide eyes that suggest stress and in the landscape is a blasted, leafless tree.

The artist is caught between her Korean childhood and inheritance and her present place in New Zealand. There is just enough generalisation to make it a symbol of the way everyone carries some burden from their childhood but it is still highly personal.

The rest of the paintings, all flooded with a clear bright light, but no cast shadows, are much more idyllic and joyful. They join the whole genre of recent art centring on wide-eyed naive young women. In most of the paintings, the artist's alter ego is attended by a big floppy-eared dog, part of a long tradition of the dog as a symbol of faithfulness.

A typical work is the large painting Picnic which could be the illustration for a children's book. The girl sits on a rug surrounded by teddy bears, dolls, red elves and precisely arranged food. It is a work of great charm but, in the idyllic landscape, that twisted tree appears again and the icing on a cake that has had one wedge cut out from it runs red like blood. Alongside, a monkey swings from its tail as an interruption or a messenger. This detail is whimsical and

there is a romping, rather naive delight throughout the work. The painting called Whim is a little symphony of pink and sweetness and there are other titles like Pink Candy and Lavender Pond which are intensely sweet.

Yet there are sinister hints. The cratered landscape in What Happens on the Moon is bleak though playful and the unsettling Annual Event of Bouncy Play achieves an intensity not apparent elsewhere.

This is an impressive first exhibition where the artist has established a style of her own and shows skill in draughtsmanship that reinforces her considerable potential.

At Milford Galleries, Mike Petre has established his position as a remarkable painter of cattle. Both his vigorous style and his subject have become familiar. He paints black and white cows with a broad brush which conveys the outward appearance and the bone structure beneath the skin. To the decisive strokes of his brush, he adds a touch of detail such as the feathering hair on the cow's ears. Another characteristic touch is that the animal's legs stop at the knees

as if they were deep in grass. Everywhere drips run down which irresistibly suggest not just the wetness of the pasture but the drooling of the animals. It is unromantic and at one with the confrontational way the animals are always directly facing the viewer. This exactly catches the way cows curiously face up to an intruder in their pasture. A ghostliness of atmosphere reminds us that they all end up at the meat works. The broad brush strokes and the patterning of

these black-and-white paintings have an abstract painterly quality.

As well as the familiar work, Petre is showing a new departure in his style. The black-and-white animals appear now in a field of dark green with a hint of horizon at the top. The paint is laid on as a thick surface, applied with a palette knife, and cattle merge into their green background. Yet the rhythm of the white areas still gives them a startling immediacy. Petre continues with his limited subject matter and situation but, in this show, extends his exploration of

the processes of painting.

Everything is also reduced to meat in the startling work of Sal Higgens whose Mourning Chorus is at the Satellite Gallery. Her work, painted with dash and vigour, shows figures with the bodies of plucked chickens and human heads. These hang in a void and might be meat hanging on hooks. There is no background or context but the chicken bodies look female. The paintings show half of humanity beating ineffectual wings in a void. The chicken wings are handless

and the fat legs have no feet. They are going nowhere. The figures are vigorously modelled and the faces that top them are cleverly foreshortened. We see them from below their chin and their heads are tilted backward.

The artist trained in Britain and the European influence of Jenny Saville and Georg Baselitz is evident.

The assurance in the modelling of the figures is counterpointed by the way streams of pinky-red are allowed to run down the canvas in ways that evoke the dripping of blood. Wires and hooks suspend the figures.

The emotional intensity of the brushwork is visually compelling and the artist comes across as powerfully motivated to make a statement about her view of the human condition. The only handicap is the lack of context for the origin of the horror. This is an aspect of humanity laid bare in a compelling way, reinforced by the emotional intensity of the brushstroke.

At the galleries

What: Daydream, by Joon-Hee Park
Where and when: Oedipus Rex, Upper Khartoum Place, to March 14
TJ says: Complex, detailed, surreal dreams of childhood where Korea and New Zealand intersect.
What: New Works, by Mike Petre
Where and when: Milford Galleries, 26 Kitchener St, to March 21
TJ says: Petre's now-familiar confrontational cattle mostly in black and white but with some new variations in thick colour.
What: Mourning Chorus, by Sal Higgens
Where and when: Satellite Gallery, St Benedicts St, Newton, to March 7
TJ says: Bizarre show of chickens with human heads painted with vigour and lots of dripping red.