Richard McWhannell strikes out in a surreal new direction
It is a week of exhibitions by veterans, with two sticking to their established styles as one makes a startling jump into new territory.
At Orexart Richard McWhannell is showing Springs and Falls.
His customary style is seen only in the self-portrait in the grand manner at the top of the stairs. From then on the two dozen paintings that occupy the rest of the space have something of his usual colour schemes but the images are crowded, strange, surreal combinations of fantasy and slim figures as odd actors in an imagined world.
It is a copious exhibition with paintings varying in size but they all have the quality of imaginative invention rather than a painterly response to actual appearance.
The results of this visionary approach vary. Specifically, shades of the weird conglomerations of the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch are an influence and adapt something of his nightmarish atmosphere. Dotted throughout are specific references to other Old Masters. A typical work is The Triumph of Death, which takes its subject and panoramic form from Pieter Bruegel.
McWhannell incorporates death on a white horse, distant fires and, as victims, princesses as painted by Velasquez. Other works have a slender link to his own imagery as in Acrobats Go Home After Work with athletic and tumbling figures rising towards a pale moon in a menacing landscape where rocks take human faces. Crowded, stretched human shapes inhabit a similar rocky setting in The Anthropomorphic Quarry.
Some of the smaller, less crowded paintings, such as The Red Admiral with its horsemen and butterfly, and Thinking About McWhannell Leaping where figures are driven between a grasping spirit and a businessman, have their own concentrated force.
What unifies all these inventive paintings is the artist's recognisable palette of colour, particularly his blues and browns. In striking out in a new direction different harmonies of colour might have conferred a greater variety of atmosphere across such a large and otherwise impressive show.
Nigel Brown's work has always had the quality of secular icons. He paints images that carry spiritual importance surrounded by a rubric of words like a chant, often with gold leaf in the background to reinforce the link with religious icons of the past.
Ancient Mariner Lost The Albatross by Nigel Brown
Within these paintings he matches local settings with his own catalogue of New Zealand poets and painters, notably Colin McCahon and James K. Baxter with Captain Cook mixed in. In this series he adopts as a symbol the long-necked albatross, the victim of sin against nature in The Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The lettering around the edges of the paintings is generally a quotation from the poem. In a painting that features a sorrowing Baxter as well as figures of Everyman and his wife, the lettering reads: "We have lost the albatross that made us strong."
Other symbols occur. A circle with a yellow pattern within it stands for the Hadron Collider as the emblem of modern science. Other poets also play their part. A portrait of William Blake is very strong but Keats, dressed in the black singlet that identifies Brown's New Zealand Everyman, rather less so.
All these paintings, with their simplified archetypes, are about human folly and its consequences. As always with Brown the principal effect of the works is to convey deep and meditated sincerity within a style that is instantly recognisable and a dedication to the New Zealand scene. His background painting is of the land and sea around Bluff. His paintings, impressive in themselves, are, however, a warning. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner speaks of redemption but Brown shows that in our modern world such an outcome of our attacks on nature is far less certain.
Bill Culbert, who has for many years lived in England and France, has made his work from the conjunction of found objects and light. As a source of light he uses neon tubing. His found objects have often been plastic containers.
Strait (Manukau) by Bill Culbert
In his show at Hopkinson Mossman the containers are large oil bottles rather like jerrycans. They come in black and in bright colours. Culbert has lined up groups of four or five and thrust a bright, white neon tube through them.
All these sculptures are called Straits. The effect makes the colours glow like jewellery. Black containers have the effect of intensifying the colours between them.
In a second area of the exhibition the found objects are coathooks mined over years from second-hand shops. Groups of identical hooks are fixed high on the wall. Poised on the hooks are neon tubes whose size matches the number of hooks in a group.
Each group is seen as a separate work but in the gallery they make a continuous strip of light, which makes the sum greater than the parts and the effect is of a single installation work.
In these, called Lightlines, the contrast between the bright light and the tarnished age of the old-fashioned hooks is piquant and matches the invention and wit of the Straits.
Richard McWhannell usually has his eye firmly on objects: faces, landscape, houses, but here his imagination leaps to strange dreams filled with scenes and scenarios both grotesque and touching.
What: Albatross Neck by Nigel Brown Where and when: Artis Gallery, 280 Parnell Rd, to May 18 TJ says: The Ancient Mariner killing an albatross is equated with modern attacks on nature. The paintings set the scene around Bluff and call on a variety of poets as witnesses.
What: Straits/Lightlines by Bill Culbert Where and when: Hopkinson Mossman, L1/19 Putiki St, Arch Hill, to May 9 TJ says: Veteran artist works his magic with neon tubes to transform ordinary objects into things rich and strange.
