T.J. McNamara: Judging a portrait beyond face value

Portrait painting is a challenge. The artist takes the inanimate materials of paint and blank canvas and has to make an image that is a recognisable likeness, yet still has the surface and atmosphere that takes it beyond simple representation. Richard McWhannell rises to the challenge again and again in his copious show that spills through two rooms at the John Leech Gallery.

On first entering the gallery the most immediately striking paintings are a series of self-portraits. Over the years he has compulsively painted his own features. It is not just the face that is instantly recognisable; he has a highly individual palette of colour, particularly using subdued shades of blue and brown which makes a work by him identifiable by its colour alone.

One exception to the prevailing blue is the most lively of the self-portraits called Me Indiana where the painter is wearing the adventurer's characteristic fedora. But there is more to this painting because the pose reproduces one of Rembrandt's famous self-portraits - he painted more than 40 of them. The modelling of the face and clothing, the paintbrush in the artist's hands, all recall Rembrandt, although the background is much lighter. The painting is subtitled Homage to Rembrandt but it is also typical of the painter that it has another humorous subtitle that refers to both the colour and the mood that has a hint of the Rolling Stones. It is called Brown Sugar.

The element of humour is continued in other portraits where the artist is wearing a striking white cowboy hat and again there is some irony in titles like I Want You to Want Me. Is the hat a Cheap Trick?

The cowboy hat enables him to show his virtuosity in the challenge beloved by traditional painters of a face partly in shadow and partly in light.

The title of the exhibition is Introducing Cowboy, Girls, Girls, Girls and after the self-portraits the rest of the paintings are of mature women. What McWhannell does well is convey the sense of their assertive personalities. Often plonked on a sofa, legs askew, they seem to be saying, "Here I am, make of me what you will."

Not all the paintings have the same style and brio. Some are straightforwardly academic but in some there is the addition of a still life, notably a benzene box used as a side table, with wood grain, brand name and its age affectionately touched in.

One ambitious painting breaks the pattern, again with a strongly humorous quirk. The French painter Balthus was famous for his nude painting of barely adolescent girls. He illustrated Emily Bronte's great novel Wuthering Heights by showing the maid dressing a nude Cathy getting ready to visit her potential bridegroom. Nearby Heathcliffe, her lover, was shown grinding his teeth. The extraordinary tension of this painting is reproduced in McWhannell's reversal of the situation where he is conspicuously nude though wearing hat and cowboy boots and a figure in evening dress is envious of his grand endowment.

Portrait painting is a highly traditional matter but something much more fashionable is seen in another copious exhibition, this time at Starkwhite. Martin Basher in his show, Free Spirit No Interest, is showing paintings, assemblages with lights, found objects, plastic bags, exercise equipment, cut glass and even diamonds, both fake and real. You only get the real diamond if you buy the work - a found rug with a big tiger on it. The artist's contribution is to put sparkles in its eyes.

The other two dozen works in the show, whether on the floor or on the wall, have a paradoxical ambiguity as they suggest both satire of the modern world and an obscure delight in the multiplicity of manufactured objects.

Some are the merest trivia with nothing more than a certain wit in their creation, like the two cut glass earrings in a plastic presentation card with a bit of tape and some smiley faces. Others have more force like Learn More About the Bible, a Venetian blind with fluorescent lights and a found Jehovah's Witness pamphlet. It says something about a false and obscure attempt at illumination.

Other assemblages are much more complex such as Miracle Workers which is a combination of banal things that seem to offer some sort of happiness: milk crates, lipstick, vitamins, posters, air fresheners, bumper stickers, bandannas and a German nudist magazine.

Also in the exhibition are examples of highly skilled painting. There are two works Left Leg Left and Right Leg Right that show high boots and a crotch and panties painted with the utmost illusionary realism and paired with very forthright abstractions of vertical bars. But everything has a spin. An attractive painting of a beach called Something Good Lapping at Yr Private Coves has rocks that are fossils of predatory monsters and a tree turned disconcertingly upside down.

The boots in Basher's show have an element of fetish in their appeal and a sense of fetish is strongly present in the work of Matt Ellwood at Michael Lett. The show is called Negotiations and Love Songs and two of the works called Centrefolds are made up of exquisite charcoal drawings of the hair of women posing as centrefolds for a magazine. No face, no body, just the rhythmic curves of the glamorous hair. Each work is a grid of nearly 40 such portraits.

The effect goes beyond oddity into the macabre but is quite striking.

The other two works are oversized toys, not on conventional plinths but on long mountings, startlingly cantilevered out from the wall. These enshrine two oversized toys, bright and shiny. One is a Smurf and the other a Lego man with his stylised hands and feet. They are given a twist; the little smurfy elf's head faces the wrong way. The head on the Lego man is pink. What is intended is not clear but the visual effect is memorable.

At the galleries

What: Introducing Cowboy, Girls, Girls, Girls, by Richard McWhannell
Where and when: John Leech Gallery, cnr Kitchener and Wellesley Sts, to April 25
TJ says: Portraits and self-portraits done with an assured flourish, an individual colour scheme and more than a dash of wit.

What: Free Spirit No Interest, by Martin Basher
Where and when: Starkwhite, 510 K Rd, to April 25
TJ says: Just what a brilliant young artist straight out of art school produces these days: work that ranges from highly competent painting to found objects - all with an ironic spin.

What: Negotiations & Love Songs, by Matt Ellwood
Where and when: Michael Lett, 478 K Rd, to April 4
TJ says: Toys and the hair-dos of gatefold models; contrasting works done with high style.