KEY POINTS:
This is a week where there are a multiplicity of shows, most of which have the quality of strangeness about them. One sculptural work even has a fourth dimension - a redolent smell.
The City Art Rooms in Lorne St is a gallery prepared to take a punt on young artists. Until May 24 they are showing work by Michael Chal and Simon Glaister. Glaister is responsible for the all-pervading scent in the gallery. His work, The Body of Christ, is a large wall of beeswax fitted between two pillars and the scent is the sweet smell of honey.
The wall is made of modules, each one a disc with four open supports. Ranks of these modules are set on a base of courses like masonry but made of wax.
The wall, with its repeated pattern, evokes screens of anything from concrete blocks to delicate carved Arab screens. In fact, it is based on the packing for a computer enlarged many times. The effect is impressive, even the patterns of shadows it casts. But why The Body of Christ?
An old explanation might be that only the actions of the just smell sweet. A more modern thought might be that the computer has become some sort of god. Either way it makes a powerful piece. It took a good eye to see the sculptural possibilities in discarded polystyrene packaging and considerable skill to cast and assemble the work.
One typically 21st-century drawback is that it is site-specific, as is Glaister's other work at the gallery where he has converted the floor of a side room into a lake of blackcurrant syrup.
This smooth, dark rectangular pond reflects with absolute precision the lighting in the ceiling in the same way as Richard Wilson's famous room full of fuel oil in the Saatchi collection in London reflected its surroundings.
But the ultimate effect is different because here the point would seem to be an accumulation of tepid sweetness rather than menace. Both of these have an air of student project about them, impressive though they are.
Chal's works have a more uniform purpose and style, done in fine ink line on old paper browning round the edges. The aged effect makes them look like the plans for some ancient temple. Many of their details are in perspective. They are almost but not quite symmetrical and they also suggest Cabbalistic diagrams of some obscure sect.
Their principal appeal over and above the sense of mysticism lies in the mind-boggling precision of their detail which, at first, seems computer drawn. Close examination of such regular forms as layers of brick or stone show the slight variations that denote the work of a very sure but human hand.
The strangeness of the work by Annette Isbey, whose exhibition Water is at the Warwick Henderson Gallery until May 24, lies in the surreal atmosphere created by the imagery.
This artist's rare exhibitions have always been at their best when the paintings are large and this collection is no exception. Particularly striking are two paintings of waterfalls which are symbols of how the land provides the water of life.
In the title painting, Water, naked Adam and Eve figures bathe baptismally in the water. The most impressive canvas is Taheke where, from a high horizon, the water falls tumultuously as a force of nature.
The smaller works deal rather sombrely with offshore islands, beaches and lowering clouds. The little figures are stylised, the people of dreams. The dream quality is at its best in The Grey Horse, a work with a Northland hill, a single cloud and a lonely grey horse.
This specifically New Zealand feeling is continued with a great deal more oddity with the work of George Baloghy, whose Driveby Art - A personal odyssey is at Artis Gallery until May 24. The odyssey is a road-trip through the icons of New Zealand art. The trip factor is emphasised by a little open red car that appears in all the works. Otherwise, they are exact replicas of well-known works in the history of painting in this country.
This is a virtuoso achievement since everyone from Rita Angus to Shane Cotton is imitated with great skill. Even in the case of Christopher Perkins' Taranaki, the tones of the colour seem a slight improvement on the original.
What is the effect? At times it is funny when a car flaps its open doors like a bird in a painting by Don Binney. At times, it appears blasphemous when the little car shoots between the ridges of McCahon's Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury.
Baloghy has always alternated exhibitions of his impressively exact landscape painting with exhibitions where he indulges his surreal fantasy and as usual his work, whatever the genre, is clever, abrasive and cocks a snook at fashionable opinion.
That oddity of subject allied to virtuosity of drawing can be so appealing is shown by Water, an exhibition by Mark Wooller at SOCA Gallery in Newton which is almost sold out.
His principal subjects are woven eel-traps painted with extraordinary accuracy. Allied to these forms are stylised meandering rivers and abstract, curved vegetative forms sometimes caught within the traps.
It is these shapes that lay open a metaphoric interpretation of the relationship of water, landscape and human activity. The thing that the works lack is a strange atmosphere to go with its oddities of subject and impressive draughtsmanship.
