KEY POINTS:
Sometimes titles are like a manifesto and the long titles at Andre Hemer's lively exhibition at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery until June 20 are a definition of where he thinks painting is at. The overall title is Paint Lust at Full Thrust, and one of the largest and best is The Order of Things (Goodbye Earnestness, Hullo Antigravity).
These paintings reject the importance of being earnest in favour of springy joyful abstractions that appear to be cheerfully spontaneous, but on examination show careful consideration and considerable skill.
These paintings bubble up in a series of overlaying intricate mazes of colour. These swirls, which come close to scribble, are nevertheless mostly sharp-edged. If they were just the result of a flourish of brushwork they would have irregular edges, but despite their apparent spontaneity they are the result of careful masking. The masks have been cut to show the colours underneath or the bare canvas that is the basic background.
The forms are genuinely amusing. In Too Many Prospects Not Enough BOOM, one form goes amusingly spiralling off at the top while there is a heavy piece of tight painting on the lower right and a great deal of dancing between.
The Triumph of Painting has a subtitle (when it's hotting up in Deutschland it's eis-eis, baby). And Art is Power surges out in a series of loops away from a narrow base with a bit of green leaping away. Its subtitle is power is money, and paint is love, with the self-deprecating addition but I don't do either very well.
The deprecation may be right about power or money or love but Hemer's abstractions are rhythmic, stylish and decorative, and keep painting at the centre. This delightful show, international in style, by an artist new on the scene shows us where painting is at, a bit shallow perhaps, but lots of style and fun.
The opposite of spontaneity is care and precision, and at the Anna Bibby Gallery until June 8, Simon Esling's speciality is delicate shading of bone. His show, called Air Land and Sea, features isolated joints and sections through bones drawn in ink and delicately touched with water colour.
He is also fascinated by the machines of war, armoured cars and aircraft, and these too are drawn with the same particularity as the bones. He is very good on architecture and draws with exactness everything from bunkers to weatherboard houses.
Eisling brings together these things in a way peculiar to himself. There are small and simple works, all untitled, which bring together a bone and a building.
A typical work is a y-shaped bone like a yoke which supports a concrete pillbox which looks like Ned Kelly's helmet.
The bigger works have titles but that doesn't make them any less enigmatic even though they are sometimes descriptive.
Mustang shows the World War II aircraft from above and below from opposite sides of the paper. Between them is a bone and blood vessel spreading and organic, in contrast to the metallic menacing shape of the plane.
In Eagle, a heraldic eagle is poised on top of an intricate bone, surrounded by bright red veins, with the whole growing out of a primitive tracked vehicle from World War I. All this is surrounded by lightning bolts.
This is imaginative but seems a little self-indulgent because the links are apparent only to the artist, although Rendezvous, with pill boxes rising from meticulously drawn armoured cars, is an image that stays firmly in the mind.
This is one of those exhibitions where virtuosity of a special kind captivates the eye, although we can't even begin to find metaphoric or symbolic meaning in its peculiar juxtapositions.
The front gallery at Anna Bibby is occupied by black and white photographs by Patrick Pound, whose commercial work is admirably precise but in this gallery, the work is invariably out of focus.
Does the blurring make it art? Actually, the effect makes the images puzzling rather than mysterious and only occasionally isolated images are really effective, such as the print in the window in which an airliner appears supported by the hand of God.
Photographs are the basis for Hamish McWhannell's Disjointed Narratives at the McPherson Gallery until Monday. The processing from old photograph to present painting simplifies and stereotypes the image, so Bourgeois Man, in bowler hat, shirt and bow tie, sums up the way of life of some European men.
McWhannell's emphasis is on the awkward aspects of reality, whether it is children huddled in a corner furtively smoking or a man competing in an ugly face contest, or a crazy woman sitting on steps imagining she rules the world.
These images suggest the disfiguring forces in life.
Their dull colour and gloomy atmosphere is summed up in the picture of a dying monk like something from Dostoevsky.
