TJ McNamara: Gymnast adds a twist to performance piece

A Plane for Behavers, performance art by Alicia Frankovich. Photo / Dean Purcell

Collage was an invention of last century, but sticking unrelated images together is exactly suited to the art scene this week. The exhibitions are so diverse that the only way to deal with them is to paste them together and hope they make a picture.

The first piece cut from this week's offerings is an exhibition at Artspace by Alicia Frankovich called A Plane for Behavers. The artist, a talented gymnast, is based in Berlin. She uses her own body in her work, and the outcomes of one performance are on show in the gallery's main room.

A variety of straps and supports hang from the roof, but the main feature is four old-fashioned televisions. At certain times of the day the TVs are on the laps of four impassive young women, facing outwards and with the televisions facing similarly. They sit unmoving while any stray viewer can wander in and look at the action on the screen. If you are less lucky, just the screens are sitting on chairs.

The screens show a crowd at the gallery seen from above, milling around waiting for the performance. The loop on each TV is about 40 minutes long. Finally the artist, wearing shin guards, arrives.

Disappointingly, she doesn't swing in on a trapeze but is carried in from the street, up the stairs and into the gallery. She is carried by young acolytes and followed by earnest art gurus. Her arrival is the end of the performance.

This piece is accompanied in the long room nearby by another work - a machine that drives a loop of wire running the length of the room. The cable quivers and goes north for about 30 seconds, then it stops and goes south for 30 seconds. It is a delivery device that doesn't deliver.

Richard Adams' paintings at Oedipus Rex Gallery are more conventional and more impressive. The exhibition is called New Music because it shares its abstract nature with music and its colour can be spoken of in terms of harmony. Appropriately, there are some simply beautiful shades of blue in many of the paintings.

The emotional response to them is inevitably tinged with melancholy.

A typical work is Pointing to the Exit with a dark horizontal balanced on a heavy vertical element. Above this solid base a great glowing red is shot through with other colours, and with a series of expressive lines that give movement as they fade from left to right. At the top there is a deep space.

The quality of the painting is extremely subtle and the sense of moving from solid dark through emotion towards the light is very involving.

Equally impressive is another big painting called Take Good Care of My Heart. This, too, proceeds from a dark space through gradual shifts of tone towards light surmounted by a flood of blue. Once again, a sense of an inchoate mass of mixed emotional colour is delivered with precise geometrical lines of intellectual endeavour. The result is captivating.

In the second room of the gallery another dozen or more small paintings on paper are also consistently successful with the most impressive called Blue Note.

In Parnell, two exhibitions demonstrate completely contrasted pages torn from the past. At Artis Gallery, Don Driver's work, which also emphasises blue, is called Blues. Many years ago, Driver was afflicted by a stroke and ceased to paint in oils, turning instead to assemblages of found objects. But there is some paint in this show because some of the works have been spray-painted with blue to unify the objects.

Typically the found objects are things like cable reels. They yield a couple of big round pieces with various layers of other objects in wood and plastic attached to them. Brand names play their part, too.

The most prominent work is the tall Potted Blue, with paint pots attached to its surface, as well as a jerry can and watering can. It is all sprayed blue except for one object which was blue to begin with - a big can that held Jeyes Fluid. In the midst of this world harmonised by blue, with a little bit of chocolate-coloured tar paper pushed in the pots, this adds an astringent note.

The same wit gives special force to Wash Away Residue where found plastic tarpaulins make a composition in shades of sky blue like a bright travel advertisement. There is a neat green piece of agricultural canvas and a bit of cord that might tie a bale down. But there are hooks in this blue and green idyll because right in the middle, matching and chiming with the colour, is a red notice from a manure bag that suggests, "Avoid breathing dust".

In the nearby International Art Centre, the front of the gallery is given over to an exhibition by Henryk Szydlowski who, as a young man, spent some years in the 1970s in Auckland before moving to Australia.

He has always sent paintings back here but never a collection as big as this. His colours are vivid, notably his reds and golds.

His forms are sharply defined and suggest rather comic, doll-like figures. They are punctuated by dots and circles that suggest eyes and mouths. All the images are connected by lines that lead the eye on an elaborate dance from one colourful shape to the next. This is bright, decorative carnival painting with plenty of life and gaiety in a style that has changed little since he was here.

There is one last torn page. The work of Andrew Blythe at Satellite Gallery is consistently sad. He makes enormously complex compositions from obsessively ranking crosses and the word "no". There are also abstract patterns that are extraordinarily intricate and the whole is accompanied by a series of self-portraits and drawings which arouse intense sympathy. The artist has a rare talent for conveying suffering.

For gallery listings, see www.nzherald.co.nz/go/artlistings

AT THE GALLERIES

What: A Plane for Behavers, by Alicia Frankovich
Where and when: Artspace, 300 K Rd, to June 27
TJ says: Right up-to-date performance art where the finished work is a video of the excited and involved crowd.

What: New Music, by Richard Adams
Where and when: Oedipus Rex, Khartoum Place, to June 6
TJ says: Consistently successful paintings on canvas and paper that move from dark to light with sonorous harmonies of colour.

What: Blues, by Don Driver
Where and when: Artis, 280 Parnell Rd, to June 14
TJ says: Veteran artist Driver uses found objects, cans, tarpaulins and the ends of cable reels to make bold reliefs that often make an astringent comment.

What: Fantasy Surrealism, by Henryk Szydlowski
Where and when: International Art Centre, 272 Parnell Rd, to June 20
TJ says: Colourful paintings made lively by witty line in a European manner by an artist whose talent was apparent when he was in Auckland many years ago.

What: Brain Storm, by Andrew Blythe
Where and when: Satellite Gallery, cnr St Benedict St, to May 30
TJ says: Dense, obsessively repetitious paintings matched by wiry prints and drawings of suffering.