Derelict carriages take on an almost dream-like quality in detailed, intense paintings
This week, several exhibitions offer a contrast in the possibilities of painting that says a lot about the varied nature of contemporary art.
At John Leech Gallery Michael Hight's show From Waimarino to Red Jacks is a series of paintings that gain their intensity from attention to the minutest detail. His work, set in the countryside, comes close to illustration but has deeper levels as good paintings should.
Some are pictures of railway carriages without their wheels, once used as housing but now derelict. A couple of paintings of rusting vehicles are in the same vein. The old railway carriages, which stand forlornly in a rural setting under a wide and cloudy sky, are notable for the anonymous darkness of their windows and the mud and mould that spatter their exteriors.
The derelict cars and trucks are conventional symbols of decay but the old carriages take on an extra dimension of a strange, almost dream-like quality. A bent brake control and an old hand-wheel throwing an extraordinary shadow emphasise their dereliction.
Even more haunted are the paintings of broken-down weatherboard houses which are familiar enough in the countryside but also have become a symbol of abandoned farming comparable to Denis Glover's famous poem about the magpies singing on a farm abandoned in the Depression.
It would be easy for Hight to slip into such cliches but the detail of the houses and their situations rescues them. A painting of just such a house alongside the Rangitikei River is given visual piquancy by the glimpse of the white cliffs on the far side of the river.
The composition gives it a twist - it does not have that front-on view of the veranda that characterised such buildings when they became part of a sentimental view of the past.
Beehives are in all these paintings, the artist's trademark since early in his career when he made abstract paintings of their textures and colour. Now they fit in as part of the whole ensemble as a bass line underlying the elegiac lyricism of the abandoned houses and equipment. The viewer is aware of a living, instinctive community carrying on with its natural activity in the midst of the relics of the past.
The hives add piquancy to a fine painting called Te Moana, a landscape without vehicles or houses but where the tall bare trunks of trees in winter are background for the citadels of hives dotted around the foreground. Hight's exhibition uses virtuoso skills of representation of the highest order and achieves heights of mood and metaphor that go beyond just representation.
Virtuoso skills of a different order are apparent in work by Australian artist Dale Frank at Gow Langsford. His large paintings are abstract, done with thick resin varnish on linen. The backing has been tilted this way and that to allow the vivid modern colour to move like a wave or drip into streaks. The paintings represent nothing but they suggest everything, from intense dramas to interesting stains on the wall. The drama is produced when big areas of colour come up against each other and mingle inextricably in complex ways.
A hint of what is going on in the painter's mind as he works his colours around and sometimes lets them find their own way is conveyed by the almost impossibly long titles he gives the works. One exceptionally large painting, with a great deal of black and darkness in the foreground and a vision of bright colour bursting out from the back, is called He was a reticent hostage awaiting his own redolent redoubtable future. Another painting refers to a little dog shivering "seismically". It has strata of colours winding together to confront two vertical surprising splashes.
Guided by the titles or not, you can make what you like of the colour interactions in these works but their sheer audacity always has a remarkable fascination.
Fascination is also part of the curious dark objects made by Lauren Lysaght in My Year of Living Dangerously at Whitespace. The artist has always made assemblages and these are her best yet because they suggest risk-taking and are designed to be provocative. They are elegantly made with vibrant contrasts in black and white. A big, black nose shape in braid approaches an object in white that looks like a bride in a dress but also suggests a pile of stimulating white powders. The danger feels real.
Damien Hirst's famous horrific shark in formaldehyde is reduced to a dainty black fin in a little vitrine adorned with bolts called Damien Envy. First Warning is a canary in a cage; Second Warning is a grenade. This exhibition is designed to shock but the elegance of its making could dissipate the effect were it not for the inventiveness of these intriguing objects and their thought-provoking allusiveness.
In the back gallery at Whitespace Emma Pratt is digging into the collective memory of her family to produce paintings from the struggle in the Pacific during World War II. There are crashed fighter planes and planes zooming low over airfields, and hazy pictures of pilots and wives and a child produced after the war. Heroic uniforms and fading women are part of this exhibition of small, deftly handled paintings where the best are really touching. The sum of the exhibition adds up to more than any individual work can convey.
Those who like to look for emerging artists might look into Nkb gallery in Mt Eden where Joy Chang is showing watercolours in her first solo exhibition. These works are exceptionally large for watercolours and the pale atmospheric washes of colour are contrasted with series of intense colours cut into stripes. The compositions are angular and this sharpness allied to the contrast in colours adds tension and energy. Sweet Twist is a work of lively rhythms of colour energising its angular shapes but quite different effects are found in Lilac Fog where shapes float in the colour like paper on water. This is an exhibition of great charm and an accomplished debut.
AT THE GALLERIES
What: From Waimarino to Red Jacks, by Michael Hight
Where and when: John Leech Gallery, cnr Kitchener and Wellesley Sts, to Sep 4
TJ says: Evocative landscape painting littered with old train carriages inhabited only by the artist's trademark beehives.
What: Recent Paintings, by Dale Frank
Where and when: Gow Langsford Gallery, 26 Lorne St, to Sep 3
TJ says: Extravagantly large abstractions done in vivid coloured resins with all the Australian artist's fascinating swagger and swish.
What: My Year of Living Dangerously, by Lauren Lysaght; Look Up Kathie, by Emma Pratt
Where and when: Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, Ponsonby, to Aug 28
TJ says: Lauren Lysaght's surreal little sculptures, for all the elegance and invention, still hint at danger and tension. Emma Pratt has drawn on family memories to make touching evocations of the past.
What: Chromatic Bliss, by Joy Chang
Where and when: Nkb Gallery, 455 Mt Eden Rd, to Aug 31
TJ says: Exceptionally large watercolours, which contrast pale wash with areas of intense colour to make a debut exhibition of charm and strength.
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