KEY POINTS:
Shakespear's song in The Merchant of Venice asks: "Tell me where is fancy bred?" In a particularly rich week in the galleries, artists' fancy has been bred from many sources that range from motor racing, music, poetry, Polynesia, Hungary and Auckland's own demi-monde.
Two Rooms in Newton have scored a coup by being the only gallery that you can roll a racecar into. Their wide space has been organised by Billy Apple to show, until May 10, a magnificently designed Can Am car once driven by Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme. In this Bruce and Denny Show, the car is accompanied by screen prints by Apple that make, on an apple-green background, a series of looping dances of the tracks they raced on. It is a fine tribute.
At Artis Gallery in Parnell, until May 4, is a series of paintings by Michael Smither who has long been a composer as well as a painter. Art and music have always been close. Da Vinci had music playing while he painted Mona Lisa. Kandinsky's early abstractions, perhaps the first ever, were inspired by music. The pianist and composer Scriabin devised a colour organ to go with his music such as his Poem of Ecstasy. He had the idea that musical keys corresponded to specific colours.
Smither has adopted the same idea and made a series of abstract paintings where the background colour corresponds to a note and a group of concentric rings of colour harmonise. The colours, chosen from a paint chart, are plain and strong.
The concentric pattern has been used by many artists, notably the British painter Peter Sedgley in the 1960s. Smither's innovation is to have a place on the painting which, when touched, plays his compositions.
The best of these works, Red Canvas, achieves a truly lyric glow that makes the yellow and green rings on the red ground radiant and echoing. Conversely, Yellow Green Canvas, inspired by the note D, is sour without being energetic. When the concentric rings are smaller, notably in some of the sharp notes, the effect is lessened.
There is another suite of works in Parnell at the Warwick Henderson Gallery until April 19, where the accomplished Christchurch artist Eion Stevens has a show called Painted Poems. His work has always been cunningly composed paintings of figures, places and things usually implying some event or narrative but not supplying all the details.
In this exhibition, New Zealand poems are matched with the paintings and supply a setting or a story. The paintings are not illustrations of the poems but exist in a parallel world.
The poems and paintings are clear, sharp and melancholy; yet leave much to the imagination. Typically, a Denis Glover poem from his sequence Arawata Bill where he has the gold prospector complain that God made the mountains of the south "hostile and vicious" is accompanied by a painting called Playing God of a heavy hand from the sky touching the sharpness of the peaks. A savage poem by Peter Bland about atrocity is matched by a simple but terrible image of a bound man catching his toe on black block. It is called Stumble.
All is not gloom. There is a lovely link between a poem by Alistair Campbell called Blue Rain with the painting Rain. Both deliciously suggest eating stolen honey as a metaphor for love. The paintings in this show are unpretentious, un-rhetorical and richly humanist.
There is something appealing too in the way Julian Hooper makes the paintings in his Átváltozik show at Ivan Anthony Gallery until May 10. Like Stevens, his works are small and give the impression of thoughtful dabbling. You can trace the artist's thinking that a flower would be nice here, and that a little bit of abstract pattern would tighten up the centre of the work, and, oh, since it's Hungarian let's have a big moustache.
In the work, Hooper is drawing on his Hungarian and Polynesian heritage for his images. Most of the work belongs to a suite of 38 works already purchased by the Queensland Art Gallery. Emblematic of the whole is Herceg (Prince) which transforms a well-known image of the ferocious Vlad the Impaler, better known as Dracula, into a tower of flowers.
The mood of a shadowy world of bar patrons, night clubs, dancers, strippers and the hot eyes of men is tellingly invoked by Tracey Archer in her first exhibition called Reluctant Voyeur at the Satellite Gallery until April 20.
The scenes that make up her sharply observed work are erotic, exotic but shabby. The sense of the underbelly of the city is conveyed in rough paint with hints of gold glittering through. This mixture is often mannered but can be strikingly successful as in the rip of paint that suggests a glove in Ponsonby I, the glow of eyes in 55 Custom Street. The flesh emerges from low-cut dresses, shoulders and faces in a dark and moody atmosphere. The show is a potent debut.
