KEY POINTS:
There are an astonishing number of galleries in Auckland, given the size of the city. Many are concentrated in the centre but further out there are some fine forums for artists to display their work.
Centre or suburb, colour is the keynote this week. At the Lane Gallery in the central city until May 5, Liam Davidson makes individual combinations of sea-green and blue with special tones of sandy yellow. As in the past, his subjects are the sea and swimmers.
The bathers in his work are carefully studied but there is an underlying, cloudy sense of symbolism. The paintings, which look like simple celebration, have uneasy undertones.
This is most notable in The End, where an attractive woman is diving elegantly from high in the clouds into a distant sea. The women in Davidson's paintings are all withdrawn and detached even as they sport in the ocean.
Several of the paintings are called Noli me Tangere, Latin for "don't touch me", which the resurrected Christ said to Mary Magdalene.
There is the sense of having a new form, of entering a new world. Swimming in the sense of entering as entering a new life or otherworldly place is what gives the best of these paintings their resonance.
Davidson is a very skilful draughtsman. A little figure wearing earrings in the corner of the cleverly composed Pink is witness to that.
This, allied to his obscure symbolism and his special palette of colour, makes him the poet of bathers.
Colour becomes all-important when we move to the Compose Gallery in Hakanoa St in Grey Lynn, where Keith W. Clancy has an exhibition of minimalist abstract art, called Radiance, until May 5. The radiance is in the colour. These are all diamond-shaped paintings with fields of colour crossed by vertical stripes.
The colour sometimes reflects the light and at other times is opaque and absorbs it. The proportions of the areas of colour within the consistent diamond shapes are related to their intensity.
The colours themselves are unusual, at times literally gorgeous. Their intersection is spectacular and the way they shift under the light fascinating.
The effects of absorption or reflection are the result of complex layering and the use of metallic paints. The glitter of mica helps to achieve intensity, yet preserves an elegant surface.
Where the under-painting subtly shows through the surface colour there is extraordinary iridescence which plays against the matt surfaces.
This is an exhibition of great accomplishment within its stringent parameters. Sheer beauty is out of fashion these days, yet these are truly beautiful paintings.
The gallery is open Wednesdays to Saturdays, 11am to 3pm.
Swinging across Auckland we come to the Seed Gallery in Crowhurst St, Newmarket. This courageous little gallery, devoted to young artists, is showing work by Jesse Watson, called through phases.
Here is an artist seeking a style. These works are varied, the colour frequently deliberately dissonant and jarring. It is used sometimes in sweeping gestures, or irregular grids or applied gold leaf.
The gold leaf produces the simplest and most effective painting in the show, One of a Kind, where the gold forms the tense shape of a predator on a field of green. There is a nod to abstract art in running a purple stripe down one edge of the painting, which really adds nothing.
Jazzy shapes and clashing colour energise Shockalert. The most ambitious painting is the nine-panelled Jungle Nuggets which combine patterning and shapes of animals in gold to evoke Indian art in an effectively decorative way.
Also in Newmarket, at the Anna Bibby Gallery until May 12, is another young artist whose colour in his show called A Decent Twitch is often deliberately vile.
Tim Thatcher deals in paradox and oddity, obviously because he feels that any kind of tradition is exhausted and needs sending up. If you agree with this point of view you can join him in his games where tree branches form illogical structures, or an image in which a tree by a swimming pool has one root in the pool and Damien Hirst's shark in a tank looming in the background.
Five Hours of Daylight has hints of McCahon in the title but not in the image with its jam of logs, all hollow.
A painting called Remember the Struggle, amid all these deliberate offences against skill and taste, will not put the viewer in mind of any real conflict but suggest clever ironic games.
The other three artists at Anna Bibby - Damen Joe, Ruth Thomas Edmond and Kristy Gorman - have pretty much abandoned colour altogether.
One reproduces doodles in a notebook; one makes intricate structures of corrugated cardboard with only a slap of paint on them; and Gorman makes flat, chaste little images in enamel on the back of transparent acetate.
A full circle returns to the centre where, at Orexart in Khartoum Place until May 5, Lorene Taurerewa has huge heads drawn in charcoal with no colour at all but great structure and character.
Dylan Lind finds his colours in scraps of fabric, paper and plastic and combines them in abstract patterns of surprising harmony.
The humble connotations of the sources of the material link the abstract to present reality.
