KEY POINTS:
One of the tenets of contemporary art is the independence of the painting. The work exists only within the four sides of its frame. This is not an absolute but is true of abstract art. There is also an emphasis on those things that cannot be rendered on the smooth surface of a photograph, the texture and thickness of paint. This links expressionism with abstraction.
This style culminated in the lyric, rhythmic work of Jackson Pollock last century but still survives as a valid and exciting method. Vigorously expressive examples are found in the work of Cristina Popovici at SOCA Gallery in Newton until August 30.
The work is audacious in its scale and the sheer hurtling energy of the paint's application.
Each work has its special harmony of colour though they all demonstrably belong to the same family. The audacity of the attack creates the impression of complete spontaneity but beneath that effect is controlled thinking.
A typical work is Inflorescence, a tone poem in Popovici's characteristic red, made up of a complexity of decisions such as when to wipe one colour into another; when to mix colour; when to contrast a wide sweep with an area of complex marks; when to rhyme and chime colours against each other across the width of the canvas. The result is a surface full of movement with elements at many levels.
Some paintings are more simple, such as Breathing Out, which is one colour, red, on the white ground of the PVC on which it is done. The PVC can be stretched into shapes by a frame as in Times White but it is the play of colour against the ground that is the essence of this diptych.
The colour is most spectacular in a group of paintings that hang from the ceiling. These are on Perspex so they are effective from both sides. They are almost overwhelming as a group and the only differential between them is the colour: orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, indigo and, of course, red.
Since she arrived in New Zealand from Romania some years ago, Popovici's characterful art has continued to evolve and this exhibition is her most consistently successful.
Over at the Bath Street Gallery in Parnell, until Saturday, is a show by Geoff Dixon that has much in common with Popovici's but the ultimate effect is very different.
Similarly, the surface is thick with pigment and swathes of paint are dripped, dropped and washed across it. But this painting is not abstract. Among the incidents that are purely paint there are carefully drawn birds, ringed planets and space ships.
The effect is not surrealistic because surrealism has the exactitude of dreams. This is a messy vision; Dixon creates a world of his own on some imagined, far-distant planet. The work is ornithology and science fiction combined.
Great emphasis is placed on the birds' eyes which stare balefully out from the clotted masses of paint. However, the birds are not where the quality of the paintings lies. The value is the richness of the surface which is consistently lively where the planet world is confused.
Native Birds of Australasia, dominated by a white loop of paint, and Wetlands 4/Cockatoo, with its explosion of red, are the most striking but all the works have a rich, dark menace. They work best as rectangular paintings. When they are in the shape of the birds they remain birds and no more; the imaginative excitement evaporates.
Equally curious but more realistic are two paintings by Johanna Pegler at the Anna Miles Gallery until September 1. These are meditative works, a landscape and seascape painted with the utmost delicacy, especially in the skies, and, in Flotilla, the horizon of the sea. There is a sense of naiveté that is completely deceptive. These are sophisticated studies in the strangeness of ordinary things.
Upokongaro has two horses that look curiously at the viewer in a landscape of cabbage trees. The effect of the white blaze on both horses is surprising and totally memorable, as is the flotilla of swans at sea in the other painting. They become an extraordinary vision linked to the bony oddity of driftwood on the shore.
Pegler's painting is about the obvious but also includes the strange heart of things. Her work is like no other.
Hye Rim Lee, whose work is at Starkwhite Gallery in Karangahape Rd until September 1, is showing stills from her remarkable animated cyber creation, TOKI, a figure with glamorous characteristics so exaggerated that, ironically, they are drained of eroticism. Candyland is full of lips, buttocks, nipples and breasts isolated in heavy circular frames. The images are polished, proud and chilly but startling.
Her animation techniques are applied to constantly transforming flasks of perfume projected on the wall of the main gallery. Hands, legs and eyes change within the bubbling richness of the flasks. The irony remains intact as one elegant bottle of perfume is an exquisite symbol of a lovely woman that periodically, and equally symbolically, spreads perfume from unmentionable areas.
