KEY POINTS:
In a lively exhibition at the Tim Melville Gallery, young artist Elliot Collins had a painting with lettering that said, "This painting has little or nothing to do with anything of any great importance but it does remind you to think about what other people are doing." The exhibition has closed but the message could be applied to a multiplicity of exhibitions in Auckland that have opened since then. While not all hugely significant, they all give us something to think about.
Mercury Bubble, by Brendon Wilkinson at Ivan Anthony, makes us think about things Gothic, romantic and mysterious but defying explanation. There is lots of purple colour, bending spines, explosions in perspective, eyes, owls and wild movement combined with car details of scooping air intakes. His biggest painting has all of these things and a good deal more. At its centre is a curiously modern goddess surrounded by the repetitive wave patterns that the artist excels in making.
There are smaller works which suggest the exoskeleton of a giant insect, inside which line and colour collide, and also some very lyrical drawings, Pre-Raphaelite in their line and mood. The result of all this skill is a jumble of ideas and images but it is confusion done with a flourish.
At Michael Lett, Campbell Patterson is thinking about himself. The gallery is darkened and the principal offerings are autobiographical video loops. Dominating one wall is a work, Lifting My Mother for as Long as I Can, which is just what it says.
The artist makes an annual video as he holds his mother off the floor. This year, he lasted 2 min 08 sec.
In other videos, he puts himself in situations such as being trapped in a folding bed. This piece, aptly called Sandwich, is notable for the pathos of his bare feet. In another work, the artist burns lavatory paper in a toilet bowl. It is all unpretentious and amusing but you really have to subscribe to theories of the beauty of the banal to see significance in these slight acts. The show is accompanied by four paintings which are deftly painted compilations of small things that interest Patterson. If nothing else it is a convincing demonstration that he can draw.
At the Warwick Henderson Gallery, Liam Barr is thinking grand in a show, Grand Land, in which he seeks to combine reality and myth, history and the present. He has evolved a stylised Cubist Maori figure to represent Tane and taniwha. His style works splendidly in the painting, Tane, where the great god figure grows from the land toward the sky with the bush-covered hills becoming his cloak and feathers the snow on the mountain. He is the source of the water of life.
The stylised face works very well as a mythological figure.
This is also true in Taku Turangawaewae where a monster born from the imaginings of the people confronts a kiwi, a much older inhabitant of the land. A newer arrival is signalled by a little church. The confrontation is awkward but the landscape is impressive.
In several paintings there is some fine work portraying lake, hill and sky. The quality of this landscape painting gives support to the awkward figures. Yet the awkwardness prevails altogether in works that refer to recent memory, such as the one that shows figures crammed in a pedal car on the footpath in front of a diary.
The real inspiration lies in the landscape and the myth, not in memories of icecream in summer.
Fine passages of paint are also found in the curious work of Tim Thatcher at Anna Bibby Gallery. The mystery of the little paintings lies in their sheer oddity. The artist is thinking of constructions and the processes of building - the way a tripod stands over a trap in the floor, the way a mechanical hammer works between polished steel, how logs might be used to buttress a structure.
In the middle of the structures and processes there is puzzling illogicality. Typically, in Johnny on the Spot, a ladder doesn't reach the ground.
At times, these details are so irrational as to seem simply an indulgence. The artist merely follows an impulse for a block of concrete here and rope there. The ropes and their knots are unconvincing. Yet titles like Famished or The Sunday Void suggest the paintings have a metaphorical significance. That is hard to determine but it still leaves delicate passages of painting, such as the bushes in the foreground of Valley Maker.
Frith Wilkinson, who shares the Lane Gallery with Peter Cleverley, shows that darkness can be portentous. The rich brown darkness of her modest paintings is sometimes dispelled to allow Mt Taranaki to emerge into the light.
Sometimes mysterious birds wing their way through the stygian darkness and delicately painted ships loom on long horizons.
Cleverley's work concentrates on the variety of moods the head of a dog can convey, and the sense of secrets in the painting of an old box.
The works are done in a spontaneous manner in black and white and resemble lithographs and suggest the artist could work very effectively in print mediums.
Horses feature in the exhibition, Saturation, by Caroline Herdson at the Satellite Gallery. In several works the horses are paired in front of a group of spectators. One of the horses wears a veil; the other, the male, is usually shown bleeding. The wounds and the blood are sacramental. Several of the modest works are very touching.
THIS WEEK AT THE GALLERIES
What: Mercury Bubble, by Brendon Wilkinson.
Where and when: Ivan Anthony, 312 K Rd, to Oct 4.
TJ says: Exuberant masses of imagery, ancient and modern.
What: Work and Exercise, by Campbell Patterson.
Where and when: Michael Lett, 478 K Rd, to Oct 4.
TJ says: Video and painting focus on the interest in the obvious.
What: Grand Land, by Liam Barr.
Where and when: Warwick Henderson Gallery, 32 Bath St, to Sep 27.
TJ says: Stylised mythical creatures impress in landscape but not in the city.
What: Nowherenow, by Tim Thatcher.
Where and when: Anna Bibby Gallery, 226 Jervois Rd, to Sep 27.
TJ says: Carefully constructed paintings about construction with passages both good and bad.
What: Transitions, by Frith Wilkinson & Peter Cleverley.
Where and when: Lane Gallery, 33 Victoria St East, to Sep 27.
TJ says: Dark paintings of the world of the spirit by Wilkinson and variations on a dog's bark by Cleverly.
What: Saturation, by Caroline Herdson.
Where and when: Satellite Gallery, St Benedicts St, to Sep 21.
TJ says: Deftly-painted images where horses stand in for humans in blood rituals.
