TJ McNamara: Prints charming and powerful

Philip Trusttum's <i>Dick and John</i> and Reuben Paterson's <i>The Nether Regions</i>. Photos / Steven McNicholl

Virtuosity is usually associated with an artist who is very good at matching paint to the appearance of things. Andrew McLeod, whose exhibition Auckland is at the Ivan Anthony Gallery, is a very talented painter. His show includes a number of small neat abstractions and larger paintings in the show incorporate a statuesque female figure representing Auckland, which gives the title to the show.

These are paintings done with authority. Against the big figure are juxtaposed industrial and architectural devices which, in a surreal way, also refer to Auckland. But it is not with painting where McLeod's outstanding virtuosity lies. The triumphs are the digital prints - made up of borrowings from a huge variety of sources that reveal his eagle eye for detail - that can be collaged together to make a world special to the artist and brought together as a modern artist's print in editions of three.

McLeod's career began with black-and-white photographic prints that used masses of the graphic symbols available to architects and town planners. These gave diagrams of interiors great intricacy and life. Throughout his career, parallel to his painting, the artist has elaborated these prints and in this show the consistent development has been brought to an eloquent peak.

Particularly fine are the two prints that massage images from Old Masters. One is a piece done as a tribute to Henry Fuseli. The print brings together a number of his paintings that show that artist's peculiar vision of The Queen of the Night and Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters and fat Falstaff.

There are little erotic bits from A Midsummer Night's Dream plus two versions of Fuseli's most famous image, The Nightmare, with a female victim and a horse's head. All this takes place on a stormy coast which McLeod has stiffened with a lamppost that indicates power, some radishes for piquancy and made the whole into a great romantic dream.

Equally potent but in a quite different way is a print that weaves remarkable details from dozens of Albrecht Durer woodcuts into a black and white maze of angels and devils, Christ, crucifixion and a rhinoceros, with touches of colour and naturalism and Durer's drawing of a rabbit to sauce its intricacy. It is the command of atmosphere that makes these prints so fascinating. Another is an Homage to Rene Lalique, the jewellery maker, whose glittering things float in a strange underwater world.

The show is full of visual dexterity. Even the paintings are lifted when their abstract rhythms are contrasted with a collaged detail. Abstraction with a Gazelle is an astringent, rhythmic black and white work yet among all this modernism is a Pre-Raphaelite lady attended by a deer. The contrast charges up the whole.

This outstanding exhibition shows a career reaching maturity of invention and is a technical and artistic triumph.

Philip Trusttum has long been one of the country's most admired artists and he is above all else a painter. His big, loose canvases are done with flourish and wit that is always enormously appealing when it is matched with his great sense of colour. His subject matter is frequently drawn from his immediate surroundings and the seven paintings that look so grand in Whitespace Gallery all spring from his regard for his horse, Johnny.

Some of the paintings are subdued like the rich brown painting where the horse's tail is being cut and the attendant is falling over backwards. Others show the horse being groomed and reciprocating by nuzzling the back of his attendant. Others dissolve into a patchwork like the jigging, jogging pattern of On a Ride. In extreme cases such as Long Neck the colour and the paint simply take over and we get fine, dashing rhythmic patterns.

Altogether it makes an exhibition that has tremendous exuberance. It has Trusttum with all his assurance and virtuosity and incorporates a very rare thing in painting, a sense of fun even in the act of painting itself.

Also spectacular is the work of a much younger painter, Reuben Paterson, at the Gow Langsford Gallery. Paterson has made his name by using glitter across the entire surface of his images. The glitter confers vivid colour and certainly these works have a dashing impact at first sight. The effect is most lively of all in a painting called The Nether Regions which is all bright flowers against a dark background and brings to mind a particularly gaudy fabric.

Fabric patterns are also behind the intricate abstract work with an interplay of curves and shapes that are always absolutely symmetrical. In The Passion the work is done with dark reds, with just little touches of green. The technique remains mysterious but seems to involve stencils. The work could be hung any way up.

On exactly the same level of technique are some big animal paintings. One is dark blue with white eyes and teeth which emphasises anger, aggression and alienation and is rather horribly called Nigger.

This work at least has the merit of having something going on besides colour. Yet two large paintings of lions hung so that they seem to be chatting amiably together have no particular focus except perhaps an obscure comment on some odd tastes in popular imagery. The total result is something bright, decorative and with an unusual technique that owes something to a British precedent in the work of James Ofili with the use of glitter and the blue of the tiger painting. The glitter is a vivid surface but even as irony and humour it is unresolved.

It is pleasant that the grounds of Auckland University and Old Government House are open to the public. The main hall of the mansion is often a venue for modest exhibitions and, at the moment, is host to Anima locus, an exhibition by two painters. Jo Dalgety adds a soft, misty sense of spirituality to her rich landscape paintings and Amy MacKinnon makes spirited images of things as diverse as baby teeth and the Easter Bunny.

AT THE GALLERIES

What: Auckland, by Andrew McLeod
Where and when: Ivan Anthony Gallery, cnr East St-Karangahape Rd, to March 20
TJ says: Some excellent painting - abstract and otherwise - supports some brilliant digital prints that make an imaginative culmination to the artist's development.

What: Paintings, by Philip Trusttum
Where and when: Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, to March 13
TJ says: Man and horse, realistic and stylised, always painted with great flair, colour and an attractive exuberance.

What: Dear Beauty, Dear Beast, by Reuben Paterson
Where and when: Gow Langsford Gallery, 26 Lorne St, to March 20
TJ says: Complex abstract patterns and frame-filling close-up of lions and tigers, all done in vivid colour with glitter, make a show with initial impact but raise the questions about what exactly is going on.

What: Anima locus, by Jo Dalgety and Amy Mackinnon
Where and when: Old Government House, university grounds, to March 12
TJ says: Landscapes softly suggest a spirit in the hills and ordinary objects are given a charge too.

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