KEY POINTS:
There are nearly 20 substantial exhibitions in Auckland this week, with art that is often surprising, delightful, charming and challenging - but usually short of amazing in the sense that it offers good visual stimulus but is not of breathtaking impact.
The most delightful romp is Looker by Miranda Parkes at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery until September 8. This is art with a kick.
The story is that one of her colourful canvases was on the floor and she gave it a kick. The subsequent folds were interesting, so she crumpled it further. Since then, deeply crumpled and folded canvases have been her trademark.
The folds are as much as a third of a metre deep and provide unexpected hills and valleys which emphasise the play of light on the work as well as making it sculptural.
The paintings are best when the arbitrary valleys are developed. In Stormer, there are bold stripes of sweet and luscious colour which would have been interesting when the painting was flat. Having been pushed into deep folds, a violet colour, a bit at odds with the rest, suggests a lurking presence and contradiction. In the very heart of the painting, this violet is washed into an irregular, turbid feeling that contradicts the gaiety of the precise stripes on the folding hills.
The exhibition is appealing because it is joyous and lively. It pushes painting into three dimensions.
Paintings that are in some measure three-dimensional cannot be photographed effectively, but there are other reasons why Julian Dashper's exhibition Much More than Minimal, at the Sue Crockford Gallery until September 15, can't be captured on camera effectively - nobody would believe it.
The artist has a considerable reputation here and overseas. His work is held in all major New Zealand public collections and has toured in America. He is our extreme example of a conceptual artist.
A typical work is Untitled, which is then given a title, Victory Over Death Part 3, a reference to a painting by Colin McCahon.
It consists of textured jute canvas stretched and primed in a craftsmanlike way. The canvas is blank. The concept is that here is the perfect preparation for a painting which will be immortal. And you can imagine any painting you like on it.
Other Untitled paintings called Nature Painting and Pretty Painting are similarly blank canvases but stacked so that you have a choice of shape and you put the landscape painting or a charming painting of your imagination on them.
Another form that fascinates Dashper is the shape of a vinyl record with a hole in the centre. He has a series of prints of this circle in various colours. One has two holes, which is something to do with the manufacturing process. All this is more philosophy than art, the purpose being to make the viewer think about the theory of the process of abstraction.
All your theory about the nature of art is needed to cope with the work of the three artists whose exhibition has a couple of days to run at the Michael Lett Gallery. Dan Arps is showing a huge sculpture. It is an abstract work of the sort made in steel for every park in Europe. It is basically two huge U-shapes. They are neither steel nor solid but made of cardboard .
Mary Teague makes her work from attaching to canvas knobs and nylon, slops of oil paint and a foam "concrete block". The links and the reasoning behind these assemblages are hard to follow.
Diena Georgetti paints neat little abstractions in a manner that was avant-garde 100 years ago - but gives them a special twist by making the frame at least as important as the painting.
The exhibition called Painting: One, at the Two Rooms Gallery in Newton, is much more conventional. The work of the seven artists - three from New Zealand, three from Britain and one from New York - are all concerned with the variety of effects that can be achieved in paint.
It is paint alone that gives Rose, a monochrome work by Marcia Hafif, an engaging surface. This abstraction is the complete opposite to the work of Bill Riley who paints on mirrored aluminium panels. These are stacked so that the colours chime together and their reflective surfaces respond to their surroundings.
The optical tricks that are possible to develop with oil paint are exemplified in the work of Jane Harris - spaces with scalloped edges. The edges are startlingly three-dimensional but the spaces they surround play optical tricks.
Most impressive of the seven is Alexis Harding, whose control over the skin on paint is mysterious and genuinely amazing. In the remarkable Black/Grey Line Painting, the fascinating surface is the result of dragging wet paint over dry without breaking the skin.
This show is a little old-fashioned overall, but shows that rectangular paintings on big stretched canvases are still valid and can be, although short of amazing, a source of great pleasure.
