KEY POINTS:
Big is good," booms the big man on the hardware ads. Well, Auckland artist Martin Ball has six paintings at the John Leech Gallery until April 28. They are all portraits and they come in two sizes - immense and smaller.
The very large ones have an astonishing impact. As you come up the steps of the gallery you are confronted eyeball to eyeball with Neil Finn. This excellent likeness is well over lifesize and painted so we are aware of every line in the face, the determined firmness of the mouth, and the hair painted with infinite patience and great dexterity.
The portrait of his brother, Tim, is equally large and has the same presence, although it's not quite so confrontational. It is an impressive feat of painting. A smaller version is conventionally accurate.
The same is true of the portraits of Max Gimblett. The big one, spectacles and set lips, is an arresting painting; the small version is a skilled memento. The show is completed by a portrait of Tai Royal, a founder member of Black Grace. Although this is also large, because it is set a little obliquely it doesn't have the full frontal monumentality of the others.
Next door at the Gow Langsford Gallery, also until April 28, is a show called Heavyweight, two big sculptures from Britain and Ireland. Both are in bronze and both have that impressive sense of bigness.
Barry Flanagan has previously made an oversized hare the subject of his work. Generally, the hares leap, dash and fling themselves about, full of rhythmic energy. But this hare is a thinker. He sits Rodin-like on the edge of a large rock where the natural texture contrasts with the smooth geometry of a cross that sits on it.
The indication is not religious but suggests the burdens we all must bear.
Any heavy message is balanced by the visual wit of the modelling of the hare, from its huge ears down to its lanky feet. It is a figure full of energy in repose.
The other big piece is by prominent English sculptor Tony Cragg. In the past he has worked with a variety of materials but this piece, in two parts, is cast in conventional bronze and has interwoven plant-like forms.
The forms are given life by repeated motifs, generally as simple as rectangles. The piece is called Form Code and the repetition of the decoration carries through the motif of code suggesting molecular replication.
There is plenty of size too in the work of Philip Trusttum at the Warwick Henderson Gallery until April 28. He has always worked on a large scale and these paintings, vividly coloured as always, are jazzy versions of customised cars and trucks.
The vehicles make bold patterns but the lettering, the signature and all the bits around the edge, are mannered. Here Trusttum is following a recipe and this show does not have his usual intensity.
Only the biggest painting, which is a Jeep with four passengers in profile and huge rhythmic waves of red, has his usual power.
There is a great deal of red in the work of Ian Jarvis at the McPherson Gallery until April 21. The works are down to a modest scale but, because of the subtlety with which they are painted, they achieve an intensity that is unusual in abstract art of this domestic size.
The show has an inapt title, The Weak Interactive Force. The paintings show circular forms in relation with rectangular shapes. The paint is luminous in the circles but dense and heavily worked in the rectangles.
Between these objects there is a fiery inchoate field of colour, often turbulent but sometimes transparent and ethereal. This lovely colour suggests an ever-present force continuously in operation and links the defined forms. Jarvis is painting about relativity with great subtlety and richness.
At the Satellite Gallery on the corner of Newton Rd and St Benedicts St until April 21 there is a skilful exhibition by a new New Zealander, Wisam Ibrahim, from Iraq. These works are of modest size and the symbolic detail is often confined to repeated compartments. In his handling of rich textures and relief elements, Ibrahim demonstrates a whole range of skills.
He creates a sense of personal vision, notably by sandy and red colours, stony relief elements on the paintings and tense and crowded figures. The relief and the compartments in works like Nostalgia makes tablets of the past. Not everything is at rest in these works. The artist is sculptor as well and one of the finest works is a small bronze sculpture called The Migrant, where the figure is swept by the winds of fate. The figure is repeated in the fine painting Sublime.
The appeal of photography lies not in size but detail, fixing moments in time. Allan McDonald's photographs at the Anna Miles Gallery until April 28 appeal not only in the way he captures the passing moment of secondhand shops and houses wrenched from their foundations, but in the extraordinary small details characterising the way things were before being swept away by TradeMe.
