Some weeks are exceptionally rich in works that impress because of their size. At the Jensen Gallery Melissa Coote is having her first full show in Auckland, although single works have been seen from time to time. A great deal of her painting deals with huge images of parts of the human body. This show concentrates mainly on hands. One part at first looks like huge charcoal drawings because of the intensity of the black background. This resonant black comes from an exceptionally dense pigment combined with Arabic gum and resin. The effect is to make the hands loom solid and sculptural and the excellence of the drawing of the carefully shaded image makes bone, flesh, veins and the throb of blood almost palpable. The sculptural feeling is reinforced by remote references to Michelangelo, especially the hand of Adam in the Sistine Chapel.
The surfaces of the hands are revealed by light and if you look closely at the paint it is richly worked. The quality is also revealed in Marsupial, the skull of a small animal where the subtle texture of the bone is particularly striking. Another work Kryptos, which means "hidden", is tinged a delicate pink which makes it a singularly lovely piece, marred a little by a strong verticality.
The second part of the show comprises hands painted against a white background. The white has been scrubbed back and the hands are luminous where the light strikes them. From the fingertips, paint has been allowed to run in streams, which have the effect of giving an outflowing of poetic force rather than the stark sculptural quality found in the contrasting works. Altogether it makes for an exhibition of exceptional power.
At Two Rooms, Brad Lochore, a New Zealander working in London, has an exhibition of large paintings filled with light but done in a much gentler way. His painting is mostly of shadows, dim structures on white walls. The shadows make abstract grids across the canvas but are also recognisably real, usually window frames, and create an atmosphere of transience of time and change.
Shadow No 136 has a lovely tinge of pale blue-green on one side like a soft fading reflection of something outside the wall of windows suggested by the grid of the painting. The enigmatic quality of time and change gives depth to Sofa Vanitas where the shape of a sofa leads to a window frame made authentic with catches. In the day beyond, the dark of evening approaches. Dutch Vanitas painting is usually still-life that alludes to the passing of time and life. Lochore does mutability potently here with a sofa and a window.
