KEY POINTS:
Textures rule at the corner of Victoria and Kitchener Sts, opposite Chris Booth's iconic stone arch.
On Kitchener are the Milford Galleries, where Neil Frazer is showing work until April 14. The immediate impact is a sense of attack. No one spreads more paint on the canvas than Frazer.
He does this mostly in alpine landscapes, with blank snowy skies and deep pools that reflect craggy peaks. He excels at depicting snow slopes, icy rock and cold pools.
Paintings of mountains are common, but Frazer's images are energised by the vigour with which he applies paint in a variety of techniques, spreading and scraping to make a thick textured surface - except for skies and the level surface of the pools.
The technique and the size of the work make results that are often spectacular, notably in the Matterhorn-like Maximum E. The thickly textured paint works equally well in Altitude and Pinnacles.
Less specific and more mysterious are the dark green of fern and forest in Evolution, which has a dark centre, and the paint is allowed to run and drip to suggest steamy dampness.
Can a painting work when it is just texture? The sooty surface of Dark Entry is suitably mysterious, but the twin works of Objectifier, which has great gouts of paint 10cm to 15cm off the canvas hanging and dripping, are too fragile and simple in concept to really grip the imagination.
This is an undeniably impressive, expressive exhibition on first impact but some of the paintings rest too much on a single impulse of technique.
Just around the corner at the Lane Gallery is another exhibition where textures are important. It runs until April 14 and is one of the rare exhibitions of prints by Brenda Hartill, a British artist who has many links with New Zealand and is a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers.
Prints, by their nature, are usually fairly smooth surfaces but many of these etchings have a slight but telling texture, often because the plate has incorporated natural elements like leaves.
The prints have collaged elements of gold and copper leaf, and thin, fine India papers. One, Space with Golden Warming Globe, incorporates 23 carats of gold.
Like many of the works, this has a circular form like the sun over a horizon. These images are derived from photos taken from space. Within this form are a variety of effects, notably autumn colours of gold and russet in Autumnal Elements I and II.
Colour distinguishes the silver winter sun from the golden summer and the copper autumn in a series of prints of the seasons. Although the titles often mention the sun, the effect is often more cool than they suggest and however varied the response, this is a captivating exhibition.
At the Anna Bibby Gallery in Newmarket is painting that is delicate, cool and smooth without a hint of texture.
The work of Emily Wolfe, showing until April 14, is designed to give the dim atmosphere of dream or melancholy memory.
Her paintings, apart from one of a bird with a mirror in a cage, show the isolation of corners. In almost all the paintings a chair or a stool is pushed into a sharp interior corner alongside faded and torn wallpaper.
The only way out of these interiors is a window veiled with tulle curtains and what is beyond the window is so dim as to be scarcely perceivable. The window is like a special mirror that conceals identity.
Wolfe has used these elements in her paintings before, but never have they seemed so intensely lonely. The paintings are rescued from conveying total depression by the loving care lavished on the painting of wallpaper patterns and the transparency of curtains.
Another overall effect is a sense of someone watched and watching. This is most intense in Haunt where the houses across the street are more than usually apparent through the dark veiled window which is pulled back a little to allow a hint of the outside world.
Usually the key comes from the patterns on the wallpaper, like the pale blue in the badly hung paper in Lagoon III. This art mixes unsettling atmosphere with an immaculate technique that supports the mood but does not dilute its disturbing quality.
In the smaller gallery there is more ambiguity and pale atmospherics. The little paintings of Alexi Willemsen have subjects that almost dissolve out of existence. Appropriately, one of the paintings is called A Whisper.
The approach works well in Delicate, which is a girl lost in mist, and The Space Between, which looks across a river. But some paintings are so misty it is hard to perceive any subject, so the potential is not exploited.
This ambiguous approach is shared by Tori Ferguson in the same gallery. She embroiders tiny mottos on handkerchiefs to stimulate our imagination to invent narratives of engagement and disappointment.
Cool detachment or tactile involvement in texture manipulate the viewer's emotions and serve the artist's purpose.
