KEY POINTS:
The art activity around Auckland at the end of the year sees many galleries showing stock but three one-person exhibitions have a highly individual flavour.
James Ross describes his exhibition - Yellow Books and Red Shadows at the Bath Street Gallery until December 19 - as constructed paintings and wall sculpture. The paintings have layers of board divided geometrically and fronted with toughened glass, not as a protective or framing device but as a way of throwing a shadow on the wall behind the work. The shadow, translucent and airy, contrasts with the thick reality of the laminated plywood panel and its intense surface colour.
Ross has been a strong force on the Auckland art scene for many years and these paintings are a consistent development of his abstract work. The basic rectangular panel shape is subdivided into other geometrical forms carrying its own colour. The appeal of the work, as well as the play between the solid and the ephemeral, lies in the colour combinations.
Generally, they stand out with the boldness of signs or banners, although the painter's confidence ebbs when he uses yellow. His yellow is acid when it should be astringent.
An exception to these sour yellows is the work Yellow/Orange/Turquoise (Shadow in the Studio) where a strong vertical dividing the colours and the shadow makes a moderately sized painting seem large and poised.
It is the nature of these paintings to demand an architectural setting, preferably of the bold, minimalist kind. Other more innovative, blocky works, labelled "Sculpture", are cantilevered out from the wall by a hidden bracket and take the form of books floating in space. Two of them go even further, designed to fit in a corner and relate to both walls. Among the books, the outstanding one is Red Book where the colour and thrust of the shape complement each other.
There is a hint of pages on the edge of the works but there is no attempt to make them really look like a book. They are decidedly sculptural adaptations of the shape and Journal (White) and White Diamond (Corner Work) successfully work the trick.
These all have an intellectual toughness but retain something of the flavour of an exercise reinforced by their repetitive nature.
Repetitiveness is one of the devices used by April Shin in her exhibition at the nearby Warwick Henderson Gallery until December 22. Her work assembles nine or a dozen tile shapes on a big panel. Each individual tile is a little painting in its own right but, collectively, they create an autumnal atmosphere shot through with occasional shafts of light. The colour is at its best in the many shadowy shades of green, russet and brown.
Delightful leafy shapes are traced on the background - sometimes a delicate sprig of leaves; in others the shapes make a bolder pattern.
These atmospheric little paintings are supplemented in two ways; here and there, with a portal of wrought iron but more frequently surfaces are treated with thick resin to make a raised shape.
These thick relief paintings are usually monochrome with nothing of the delicacy of the works with the thinner surface.
Some paintings are made up of circular elements which don't suit these poetic glimpses of colour and shape, as they contradict the sweet surfaces by indicting a view and the white of the surrounding panel becomes far too insistent. As in previous exhibitions by Shin, individual paintings and even individual rectangles within the paintings have a shady leafy charm all their own but when gathered together as a big exhibition they lose some of their intensity.
Mladen Bizumic has talents that take many directions. His work, at Two Rooms until Christmas, consists of drawings, constructions and videos. Bizumic is brilliant at adapting graphic systems, plans, architectural drawings, projections and such like to his own artistic purposes. In the drawings, the system he is adapting is the contour map.
On a black background, he intricately traces contour maps in grey line that occasionally flashes into white. It is fascinating to follow these lines and create in imagination the hills and valleys they describe. It is particularly interesting to trace along the shoreline and enter secluded bays and harbours. These drawings are at their best when the islands they describe are in the middle of the rectangle as they might be on a map. Shifted out of centre, they lose the resonance of reference to reality. Individually they are fascinating but at Two Rooms there are too many in one space.
This is not true of the videos which have a special set-up, projected from under the seats on which the viewer sits. They take the ordinary and make it seem miraculous.
One shows shapes passing big doors of occluded glass, capturing the bustle of a city from inside out. The other makes extraordinary patterns of the light on the water lapping under the big wharves at the bottom of Queen St. The way the city's main drain looms large and dark is eerily mysterious. In its own way it is a revelation and a fitting end to the year of art in Auckland.
