KEY POINTS:
A mass of exhibitions this week offer different sensations in a series of intriguing explorations. The sensation offered by Mal Bouzaid at Oedipus Rex until July 13 is the visual excitement at the edge of the sea. Most of the paintings are a bold splash of white across a canvas and have an unmistakable link to spray and the sea. What makes them different from a photograph is that they are unmistakably the work of a hand.
The artist has a long association with the sea. Her previous exhibitions have been tighter than this. Her earlier works had bands of colour that indicated beach, sea and sky. This show has movement and an expressive freedom that was not apparent before.
The outstanding painting is Falling Water (detail pictured), where the movement is down the canvas, and the intermixing of forms is more complex than elsewhere. This offers a limited variety of sensations but is consistently effective as a step forward in visual and painterly vitality over the contemplative nature of her previous work.
The sensation offered by Bob Kerr at the McPherson Gallery until July 14 is again an interaction of land and water allied to the sensation offered by the obvious hand of the artist. For his book illustrations, Kerr has evolved a technique of painting on a hard board surface and scratching forms through the liquid paint.
The technique allows the moulding of hills and gullies by apparent brush strokes. The trees that adorn the hills are created white and ghostly by scraping and scratching. Occasionally a special flourish, where the medium is flooded and allowed to run, produces the effect of tangled underbrush, but elsewhere, as in The Road to Kawhia, it is arbitrary.
The best paintings have a strong manmade form to contrast with the intricate natural shapes. Particularly good is Ministry of Works where a bridge makes a dramatic leap across the pebbly bed of a river.
In some paintings, contrasts of light and dark are used dramatically and this works well in those that feature a flag, notably Donald McLean Raises a Flag II.
The work of Marisia Dudek at the Seed Gallery in Newmarket offers a consistent sensation of the strange atmosphere created by trees dark against the light. The artist is excellent at painting foliage, and her paintings feature a consistent sense of mystery.Voices suggests somebody lying on the ground looking up the trunks of trees towards the sky. Butterfly House stands beside the side of a road, which would be lonely, but for the presence of a street lamp.
These romantic landscapes are more dream than reality. Their consistent Gothic charm, though, is surpassed by the one vividly red painting that adds a romantic figure with bare thighs and carnival mask against the spiky leaves of a palm.
Another show dominated by one image is the photographic work of Geoffrey Heath called for ever, at Roger Williams Contemporary until July 19. The most impressive is a large print showing a typically New Zealand suburb, with a mixture of housing and small factories and a dark line of hill and bush in the background.
What gives it a special frisson is the presence of two legs hanging in the air in the foreground. This gives a surreal fillip to the image and suggests a victim of the surroundings.
At Anna Miles Gallery until July 14, the sensation offered by Kirstin Carlin is the bold statement of the obvious. A subtle irony is at work. The paintings seem to say you can push the paint around awkwardly but the subjects will survive this false naivety and still be a red tower built as a folly, a chateau in the mountains, or a castle in the snow.
Deep, emotional sensations are in the work of an older generation at Artis Gallery in Parnell. There are famous names, from Tony Fomison to Peter Siddell, but what is extraordinary is the sensation of melancholy that breathes from these images.
