KEY POINTS:
By this time of the year, art in Auckland is a hive of activity. As often happens, some of the action is concentrated in Karangahape Rd, where, coincidentally, video screens play a big part.
The powerful exhibition by Ronnie van Hout at Ivan Anthony Gallery until March 3 features just one small screen, buried deep in a rock. The exhibition is called Ersatz, which means an imitation or substitute.
The rock with the screen is one of 14 that are substitutes for the edge of a beach. The tiny screen shows dim images of beach and bush. The piece is universal and personal. It is the New Zealand experience of being at the beach, and the screen evokes the memories of childhood.
Touching as this is, it is not as potent as the figurative pieces which dispense with screens but still retain that tension between personal and universal meaning.
Dominating the gallery is a standing figure in suit and gumboots. It is the image of a masculine, ageing, passionate fanatic, with stringy beard, lined face and straggling hair, holding a plastic bag that contains his lunch.
It is at once sublime and ridiculous. We are told it is a self-portrait of the artist deliberately aged. The figure is shaking his fist against time and circumstances that have transfigured him. It is not comfortable but it is certainly memorable.
Even more gut-wrenching is a seated figure in the first gallery, clad in pyjamas, bare of foot with untended toenails, and tilted disturbingly against the wall. Above him are empty thought bubbles.
The mood is of depression, but also the sadness of those who are losing touch with reality. It is a little less than life-size because the person has shrunk into himself.
Other works in the gallery - an alien hung out to dry, a rippling tube of red making sculpture from the alimentary canal, and a row of gumboots that is on every farmer's backdoor - are clever works but cannot compare with the humanity of the figurative pieces.
Screens come into their own, although there are only three small ones in Smoke and Mirrors by Steve Carr at the Michael Lett Gallery until March 3. Here, the principal emotion evoked is anticipation. Each work involves a witty pause while we wait for something to happen.
In Tablecloth Pull we see a table laid with plates and glasses on a white tablecloth. We contemplate this and wait and, sure enough, the artist comes along, stands by the table, meditates, reaches for the edge of the tablecloth, pauses, thinks, and we know he is going to do that trick where you whip the tablecloth out without disturbing the settings.
Then he reaches forward, pulls the cloth and everything falls to the floor. Our anticipation is denied. Reality has entered.
Water is in another work. We watch the water. It could be a pool, the sea, the ocean. Then the artist dives in, goes deep. Will he come up? Yes, he does and the tiny drama is over.
The third screen shows matches stuck in a cigarette box. One is lit and we anticipate the others catching fire. They don't. Our anticipation is disappointed. The artist's physics have failed him and, in truth, the result is silly.
But there is something to be said for the tablecloth video. Someone eternally doing a trick that never comes off; an eternity of anticipation and disappointment. Yet three little videos make an interesting website, hardly an exhibition.
Further along the road at Starkwhite Gallery are three works called Fictions by Nicolas Jasmin, a Frenchman working in Vienna. This exhibition also continues until March 3. One screen is conventional size and shows a loop called Only for Your Eyes.
On a split screen, the image is symmetrical but constantly moving. It is a clip from the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, where a bright red rope is fastened to a cleat in rock. The red rope throbs and changes and stretches, the cleat opens and closes in an extraordinarily fascinating way that is curiously erotic.
The next screen is larger. This loop is all about a manhole set like a drainpipe in a forest. The manhole rotates with a grating noise, moved by a mysterious force underneath. It opens and we are gazing into a dark void.
It suggests all those stories about sewers under the city, from Les Miserables to The Third Man to giant crocodiles that were once little when they were flushed down the loo. It certainly involves the imagination.
The last work on a big screen is really too much. It is a caravan in a Paris street, and if you have patience to watch you might perceive it has begun to tilt. It is little reward.
What screens don't give you is a sense of touch. They are a shiny surface. There is still a place for the surface worked by skilled hands using colour and form.
Until the end of the week an excellent show of painting by Christine Gregory is at the Edminston Duke Gallery. These are turbulent paintings of swirling vortexes that use the sea to suggest moods and passion.
The outstanding work is Tempest. This painting is predominantly blue and white but shot through with subtle purple, green and yellow. The surface is painted, splashed, scrubbed and worked in various ways that suggest energy and movement -a potent symbol of emotional turmoil.
