TJ McNamara: Fables, illusions and hard rock

Tear Drops by Hanui Kim at the Warwick Henderson Gallery. Photo / Richard Robinson.

Purple is a remarkable colour. It's the colour of nobility; it's the colour of decadence. Above all, it's the colour of dreams and illusions. The remarkable show of painting by Brendon Wilkinson at Ivan Anthony Gallery makes rich use of purple. His exhibition is a triumph of style that mixes the complexity of the draughtsmanship of horror comics and graphic novels with the fluent curves of art nouveau and the work of the late 19th century symbolists.

These purple paintings show the artist's versatility by being completely different from the tableaux of his architectural models and oil paintings. They are all in watercolour, with one exception.

The women that figure in them have more than a touch of femme fatale from the 90s and their clothing is agitated by complex waves of line. This rhythmic treatment recalls symbolists such as Jan Toorop, who combined Javanese patterns with European subject matter, and Gustave Moreau, who surrounded his subjects with masses of filigree ornament.

The special thing that Wilkinson does is make complex interactions between these women with their impossibly conical breasts and the demons surrounding them. Their rhythmically patterned dresses are not clothing but a cloak of power. They make the women both enigmatic and dangerous.

The best of these works have real intensity and the transparency of watercolour is used to great effect.

In Luxuria, a dark-eyed woman wearing a dynamic dress is clad in jewellery created by resist techniques, probably using wax with the watercolour. The powerful female figure is surrounded by roses, softly and transparently painted, using qualities that only watercolours can produce.

Despite the delicacy, the effect is not entirely charming because some of the flowers accompanying the roses have dangerous, poisonous colour and the central figure is menaced by a disembodied hand reaching out of the transparent background.

Even in Heavy Heart, an elaborate flower piece that involves masses of beautifully painted intricate leaves, the two central women hold disparate objects - one a raw heart, the other a rose, and the sweetness is crossed with the macabre by sharp-toothed bats which flit through almost every work in the show.

There are times when the artist yields to creating demons with masses of sharp teeth where more mystery and less explicitness would intensify the dream. Nevertheless, throughout this large show there is evidence of imaginative and technical brilliance that creates a special world seductive and profoundly uneasy. This brilliantly psychedelic work is an escape from mundane reality into a world of myth and magic allied to Dungeons and Dragons.

In his exhibition 20 Years of Painted Illusion, Mervyn Williams has magic of a different kind - the extraordinary mystery of how his paintings are made. His style has consistently been to produce three-dimensional illusions across fields of intense colour. His illusions of depth defy analysis. Over the years, his canvases have had ridges, shadows and forms that are utterly convincing and tactile but, on closer inspection turn out to be completely flat.

Yet the work, so consistent in its illusions, is much more than painted trickery. He uses his magic to give life to rich fields of saturated colour. The peak of such work is the rich gold of Precept dominated by a circle like a sun with ripples that give a structure. It also works in the dark monocolour of Quest as much as the massive blue and gold of Duo. The red circles of Ring Cycle simply sing.

This control of colour lifts these paintings from simply clever to a body of stylish variations done consistently throughout the 20-year career of the title.

An artist just starting out is Haneui Kim whose show No Dilemma is at the Warwick Henderson Gallery. Her paintings are all of young women and filled with cascades of hair that often cover most of the countenance but leave eyes darkly searching. The women are associated with falling patterns of water and flowers. The effect can be charming as in Dreaming for Dreaming, or melancholy as in Shame where six women crowd together using their hair as a defence and grasp desperately for the flowers.

The works are all acrylic on canvas and the colour is soft and appealing, though the manner is even and dry. The combination of young women and flowers is fairly conventional and delicately done. But in several works the delicacy has more bite. One is Empty Chest where the flowers fall from an upturned box and Teardrops where the face surrounded by the rhythmic swathes of hair is wry and questioning rather than pretty. In this painting, green spirals give a sense of complex imagery not found in the conventional sweetness of the flowers, the plants making fine tracery with leaves like teardrops.

The most famous material in all sculpture is probably Carrara marble, used by Michelangelo among many others. All the works that make up Martin Selman's exhibition at the Sanderson Gallery are in this famous material. Yet the sculptures themselves have a great deal to do with pop art and the business of making ordinary objects from life monumental by virtue of carving them in stone. The works are still-life in rock. Exhibited on a great black slab of granite are an oil container, a flat cap, a lock, and a container for orange juice all carefully crafted in marble. There are larger works such as a satchel, looking very weighty and closed with a detailed padlock. Astonishingly, there is a pouffe - a big round contradiction in stone complete with seams.

The carving is done with skill and the detail of such items as the satchel is remarkable. The effect of making these objects in stone is to make a landscape of them as the eye follows the folds and crevices. Two works are titled Fold I and Fold II, resembling folded blankets - the landscape connection is explicit.

The sculpture is a grand idea but needs rather more tension, perhaps by deeper undercutting, so the works take on a more vigorous life of their own. A notable case is a skull where an opportunity is missed to make deep caves of the eye sockets and to manipulate the passages of the Nasal cavity. Transfiguration of imitation into art is not easy.

At the galleries

What: Silverfish by Brendon Wilkinson

Where and when: Ivan Anthony Gallery, 312 Karangahape Rd, to Dec 23

TJ says: The versatile artist shifts his considerable talents from dramatic architectural models and oil painting to making watercolours that are vividly purple, literally as well as metaphorically.

What: 20 Years of Painted Illusion by Mervyn Williams

Where and when: Artis Gallery, 280 Parnell Rd, to Dec 11

TJ says: The paintings show Williams' well-known capacity to convey three dimensions on flat canvas almost miraculously but it is colour that gives them life.

What: No Dilemma by Haneui Kim

Where and when: Warwick Henderson Gallery, 32 Bath St, Parnell, to Dec 10

TJ says: A debut exhibition of considerable charm given force by underlying tensions among young women surrounded by flowers.

What: Sculpture by Martin Selman

Where and when: Sanderson Contemporary Art, 251 Parnell Rd, to Dec 10

TJ says: Everyday objects skilfully carved in marble, thereby making solid monuments out of caps, cushions and bottles.

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