TJ McNamara:Elegant works strike the right tone

Upper Linda Ice Shelf - Mt Cook, by Dean Buchanan, at the Satellite Gallery. Photo / Dean Purcell.

Discussion of art, especially of abstract art, often calls on the vocabulary of music: composition, harmony and dissonance, to describe visual effects. This is particularly tempting in the case of the exhibitions at Two Rooms.

The painting and sculpture of Noel Ivanoff could be likened to a series of lovely musical chords, with an extra element. In addition to admiring the colour and shape, we are called to consider the process of making, just as we might admire the craftsmanship of the violin that makes fine music.

The supporting structure of his work has always been a preoccupation of the artist. The painting is not possible without the craftsmanship of the vehicle.

The paintings, with their delicate, marbled duck-egg blue, are bent into a curve by their mounting, made like a stretcher but on display beyond the curve of the painting and holding it in a tense bow.

Painting, mount and space combine to make what might be thought of as abstract silent music and the process of making is played out in five variations.

The sculptures on the wall and floor are also variations on themes. The wall pieces have pine shelves and boxes as support. Within the support is a white block of polystyrene hollowed into a precise oval cave. Part of the cave is softly coloured and casts an even softer reflection on the other side. These works are soft and full of charm but the wooden support gives a sense of strength.

The feeling of art-making process is carried further by the pieces on the floor. Each contains an unembellished curve. This one pure note is created and supported by a framework of pine battens. Balancing the support is a shape like a crate that evokes the process of transporting and protecting art.

Ivanoff is at his most subtle in this show, but he also has such elements of strength and so many references to the ceremony, process and craft of art that it is his best work yet.

Subtlety is also in the work of Simon Morris in the upstairs gallery. All eight paintings begin with the bare lovely surface of the fine canvas, then vertical stripes of colour have been added. Each of the perfectly uniform stripes is a slightly richer tone of the first stripe.

The effect is exactly like minimalist music that has no rhythm or melody but relies on tiny shifts of pitch and timbre. It makes small neat abstract paintings that work well in concept and realisation except for Painting #16 in red where the final red shift is hardly apparent.

No one is more forte in a painterly way than Dean Buchanan whose work is at the Satellite Gallery.

Some of the paintings are a result of his customary venture - tramping in mountains and by lakes. Scree slopes, deep crevasses, rocky out-crops and distant peaks all feature under masses of rolling clouds. All this is painted on a large scale with stylised vigour and potent driving rhythms, usually on unframed heavily textured canvas. The painting can be very exciting when it emphasises the dangerous steepness of icy slopes and the sense of abyss in crevasses. He is also good at depicting the tumult of clouds among the mountains and seen from above.

Every so often there is a slip into unconvincingly raw colour, especially blue, that comes from the directness of approach and attack. Three paintings - Linda Glacier, Tasman Glacier from Cook and Upper Linda Ice Shelf - are particularly outstanding.

Dean Tercel, whose work is at Orex Art, also does work that is strikingly bold and vigorously painted but tempers it with some tiny, polished miniature paintings.

His portraits of women are painted with lots of robust attack. In the past his models were usually nude. These women are clothed but a sense of uneasiness still prevails and contributes to the perception of the personality of the sitter. One portrait of a young woman holding a glass which appears half empty or half full, is titled, How Could Anyone Know How I Feel. Other details work metaphorically, too, such as the neatly peeling wood of the window frame on which a woman with a guitar leans, Escape into Harmony. These works, well drawn and strongly painted, are the real weight of the show. Elsewhere, there is too much reliance on the cliche of the broken doll to suggest psychological damage and the small works, though intense, are the worst offenders.

In many ways the most fascinating of all the work this week is an impressive show played out pianissimo. Calligraphy by Kazu Nakagawa at Bath Street Gallery is so quiet its small panels are almost lost in the wide space of the gallery and the lettering on the panels is so delicate it defies photographing.

The lettering is classical Roman capitals where the serifs give stability but it is painted with such delicacy it has a sense of transience. In the longest of the works there is a rubric listing LOTS OF RAIN-SUN-WIND-DAY-NIGHT. The panels show ageing and in the last panel the surface has flaked away to reveal the textured base of the work and emphasise the juxtaposition of permanence and impermanence.

Although the exhibition is called Calligraphy there are no traditional characters in brushwork. But a second group of works employ cursive writing using the phrase, "and land". In one fine work the writing begins in light and dissolves in darkness conveyed by an insert of weathered kauri treated with black pigment. A companion piece has the kauri rubbed with white and the pigment is allowed to weep in places.

The exhibition is completed by a long, curving branch of oak called Bow. It is treated with dark resin and oil paint and inscribed with lettering that resembles ancient runes. It is a mystic work in a magical exhibition.

At the galleries

What: Skin Cradles, by Noel Ivanoff; Daily Paintings, by Simon Morris

Where and when: Two Rooms, 16 Putiki St, Newton, to Sep 4

TJ says: Ivanoff's elegantly crafted structures give extra status to colour, surface and line while Morris' paintings record subtle shifts in tone.

What: Mountains and Rivers, by Dean Buchanan

Where and when: Satellite Gallery, cnr St Benedicts St & Newton Rd, to Sep 4

TJ says: Visions of mountains and lakes energetically painted to emphasise the steepness of slopes and the dangerous depth of crevasses.

What: This Life, We Dreamt, by Dean Tercel

Where and when: Orexart, Upper Khartoum Place, to Sep 4

TJ says: Deftly characterised, detailed portraits of restless people are matched with small, symbolic still-life.

What: Calligraphy, by Kazu Nakagawa

Where and when: Bath Street Gallery, 43 Bath St, Parnell, to Sep 11

TJ says: Aged panels are matched to immaculate lettering as symbols of meditation on life and nature.Degree of subtlety brings harmony to paintings and sculptures

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