KEY POINTS:
Sometimes there is excellent art that looks obvious, even easy. Yet it has layers of association that make it much more complex than is immediately apparent. The exhibition by Dick Frizzell, who can paint anything in any manner, at Gow Langsford, is called Walking Back to Happiness. The title is apt because this exhibition returns to the comic book images that were an important part of Frizzell's repertoire early in his career.
These paintings are enlarged coloured versions of the comic strip about the Phantom. In the years before television and even much later, the Phantom appeared as a syndicated comic strip in a number of newspapers. He was always masked, always with his horse and dog, doing heroic things in an unnamed country in Africa. The drums were always beating to announce the presence of the Phantom, "the ghost who walks". He wore a ring which, when he punched people, left his mark on them.
He also left his mark in the memory of a generation.
The paintings in this are all in the plain, direct style of those comics, enlarged and coloured to capture the essence of their appeal and the force of their images. It does much more than pop art usually does, recalling a style, and making plain the emotions expressed. The paintings are a nostalgic still-life of comics and, for the most part, there is not a stroke out of place. It is a virtuoso display.
A typical piece is Grieving Phantom. This large painting shows the hero as a huge shape with head bowed, dark and monumental as a sculpture on a tomb. Beside him is a dark empty chair that, in a nice piece of composition, leads the eye to what is unmistakably a hospital bed. On the bed lies a figure covered with a sheet, with just enough indications on the sheet to show a face and a prone body. It might be a comic book illustration but the sense of grief is immediate and touching, yet it is wryly witty.
The background beyond the bed is painted with a texture and subtle colour that would make the name of most abstract painters. This surface has another layer of meaning. It has become almost a cliché in New Zealand painting that to let the paint run and drip as an indicator of sadness and mourning. Painters from Bill Hammond downward use this technique and with a gentle irony Frizzell uses it in the background here. The image is nostalgic but it also comments on the contemporary scene.
It goes on: a big hairy fist effortlessly stopped in Smack, an old-fashioned aircraft silhouetted against the moon, a touch of sweat on the face of Fevered Phantom, the dark shape of horse and rider in Long Ride Home, the irony of Mr Walker has a Cup of Tea and the lipstick and pose that dates Bathing Woman. This is not to pretend that this is a deep or profound show but as an exercise in style that evokes a time, it is a vastly entertaining product of enormous skill.
The work of Heather Straka at the Anna Bibby Gallery is another exercise in style, this time High Gothic. Straka in the recent past has shown powerful portraits against a dark background. The figures' gender is ambiguous but what grips the viewer is the penetrating gaze which gives them a highly romantic, almost hypnotic presence.
There are some examples of these striking, dark figures in the show - all called Still Life - and they are exceptionally fine. The rest of the exhibition is made up of carefully painted severed figures with labels, and unrecognisable bits of tissues alongside drops of formaldehyde. Since she has been awarded a fellowship in Dunedin we are told Straka has attended a number of dissections. These obviously appealed to the macabre and bizarre side of her artistic personality.
Yet although we can recognise a finger or even an eyeball in some of these paintings they are not transformed into something really strange but just seem an oddity. Chunks of brain tissue may act as a memento mori and remind us that all flesh is meat but these need to be incorporated in a wider vision. They seem small stages in the development of a very talented painter.
Much more life-affirming, though it is abstract, is the work of Matthew Browne at Artis Gallery in Parnell. He is showing paintings and sculptures where loops and twists and turns of line are matched with elegant areas of colour.
On the whole the sculptures, though they are quite small, work even better than the paintings. What you do is let your eye follow the curves as they leap and jump in a rhythmic dance between the areas of colour. The sculptures are lyrical and, in their own way, absolutely delightful.
Having enjoyed the dance of their abstract rhythms the viewer can go next door to the Jonathan Grant Gallery and view the work of Simon Richardson who, in his show called Otago Origins, rejoices in painting exact detail of people, landscape and the crackled skin of a sausage on the barbecue.
The show is notable for some fine drawings including a portrait of Anton Oliver that captures his thoughtful character.
Excellent drawings also make up the exhibition by John Pusateri in the small Seed Gallery in Newmarket. The most striking ones show a woman wrestling with a man. The vehemence of the attack and the defensive restraint of the man are powerfully expressed by the figures placed in a defined but anonymous space. This space gives them a metaphorical as well as illustrative force.
This week at the galleries
What: Walking Back to Happiness, by Dick Frizzell
Where and when: Gow Langsford Gallery, 26 Lorne St, to Dec 5
TJ says: Nostalgic images of the Phantom painted with great style and evocative of the past but also present and immediate.
What: (Life) Still, by Heather Straka
Where and when: Anna Bibby Gallery, 226 Jervois Rd, to 29 Nov
TJ says: Powerful Gothic figures and macabre chunks of tissue that show all flesh is meat.
What: Mercurial Space, by Matthew Browne; Otago Origins, by Simon Richardson
Where and when: Artis Gallery, 280 Parnell Rd, to Dec 7
TJ says: Joyful, bright abstraction in painting and sculpture in one gallery; cold but meticulous realism of Otago landscape and people in the other.
What: Drawings by John Pusateri
Where and when: Seed Gallery, 23A Crowhurst St, Newmarket, to Nov 23
Where and when: Fine drawings of wrestlers engaged in the battle of the sexes.
