KEY POINTS:
You should have been there," is an often-used phrase for an experience that can't be effectively conveyed by description.
Max Gimblett's annual show at the Gow Langsford Gallery until November 10 is a variation on this: "You have to see it." It is in the nature of his kind of abstract painting that each work is a special visual experience that can only really take place in the presence of the work.
As always, New York-based Gimblett is matching geometrical shapes that have mythic or symbolic history with spontaneous gestural painting that has strong links with calligraphy and Asian brush painting. This contrast is linked with beautifully made quatrefoil where the surfaces, immaculately prepared with gesso, have the richness of gold leaf, Japanese leaf wood, silver leaf and the polish of modern vinyl polymers.
The effects are at their simplest in an impressive work that references the saintly Renaissance painter, Fra Angelico, whose work always had rich gold backgrounds. Gimblett's painting is a Gloria, a sunburst but a sacred sunburst. The work is circular, it has a basis of red clay and, from a centre, rays reach out, meticulously incised into the gold leaf. It is not only a piece of decoration, it really expresses joy in the spirit.
The exhibition called Less Than Absolute Zero by Peter Stichbury, at Starkwhite Gallery until November 3, provides experiences of a different order. His work is wry, poignant and based entirely on the human face rather than abstract gestures.
Yet there is an abstract quality in these paintings, the faces are stylised, subtlety distorted so that we are aware that the people portrayed are never quite what they want to be. In this way, a face called Man Pretending to be James Schamus seems to be the perfect egg-head, scientist or pontificating commentator. The egg-shaped outline of his balding head emphasises this and his spectacles, thin mouth and tidy bow tie. But it is all too neat, his staring eyes shows he is not entirely at home in his role. He's a nice guy, but he is not what he thinks he is.
Stichbury's paintings have always focused on the human face. He began with beautiful boys and girls embarrassed about the roles they were expected to play. His subtle distortion rounds out the faces so, in his previous show, they fitted well when painted on old lawn bowls. In these more conventional paintings, the roundness that emphases oddity still works best for him. When the paintings become a bit flat, the feeling of unease doesn't really work.
Yet it does work, in a complex way, in the fuller face of Man Pretending to be Nick Yank. This is a young man landed with responsibility, he has a big badge that says "Juror" and he looks very confident. He thinks he is facing up to responsibility but there is something subtle about him that shows he is really frightened by life. Both his tie and his mouth have been loosened by uncertainty.
The subtle satire of this face lends itself well to reproduction and the painting has been reproduced by an exact photographic process in an edition of 12 which has been hung in a row as a jury. The piquant oddity of this is something only Stitchbury can do.
The subtlety of the handling of paint by Jude Rae is her still life painting. She makes visual music out of the flow of light over objects as commonplace as gas cylinders or fire extinguishers.
In her present show, called Object Painting at the Jensen Gallery until the middle of November, she again paints simple objects making even the edge of the table on which they sit quite magical. Just as impressively, she paints the paradoxical refraction of colours through a glass vessel half full of water.
In this show, she is also painting leafage and thereby introduces a curious note of melancholy like the "vanitas" paintings of Dutch still life. She is not painting flowers but branches of eucalyptus. The leaves are still green but distressed so that they make falling, hanging patterns. The brown twigs that support the leaves are thrust into jars and the water in which they sit has turned brown, too. This rich brown, which is the underpainting, sets the key for all the minor harmonies.
The leaves are not painted in any great detail.
They function as pattern and objects on which the light falls, but their reality is emphasised by the way in which light cords swing down in the space of the painting - part of the harmony of colour and composition, but bringing in a note of everyday reality to the melancholy cadences of the work.
Dream and reality is part of an intriguing small representative exhibition of the highly individual work of Mary McIntyre, at the Remuera Gallery until October 26. There is an example of her big painting - a muscle man against a background of canned peaches and mountains upside down - and some very taking examples of her work on small panels which juxtapose a little scene in the Domain with a beautifully drawn nude.
The excellence of her draughtsmanship is shown as well in the birds and branches of these little works. This is traditional painting of highly unconventional imagery.
