TJ McNamara: Confident works reflect long, rich experience

Hollow by Peter Gibson Smith. Photo / Dean Purcell

This week we have a rich take of mature artists working at the top of their game, with interesting contrasts between those who cultivate stillness and those who make their lines and colours full of movement.

The work of Jude Rae at the Jensen Gallery provides quiet excitement. Her still-life makes the simplest of objects monumental.

In this show, she has only the plainest of subjects: bottles, boxes and vases. This time, she even eschews the hectic red of fire extinguishers that have often given energy to her work.

The red is still there as underpainting that occasionally shows through to give life to her backgrounds, often beautifully modulated. In a typical work, (SL 281), a blue and white vase with a long neck is placed near a black box on a table polished enough to show reflections as well as shadows. The work is keyed up by an orange edge to the table. In such a work, everything is harmonised and flooded with light.

Nearby, (SL 282) features a translucent blue vase counterpointed by a tall brown bottle with the whole transformed into a lovely harmony. Other works are even more simple. One consists of just three boxes, yet the light and soft handling of the paint confers them with great dignity.

The show includes one work that is all light, shadow and reflections. It is an impressive painting of a corridor in Paris but the real quality of the show is in those still-lifes where light is absorbed and reflected and made to sing.

The completely different work of Matthew Browne at Artis Gallery is full of dancing movement. It seems to begin in creative doodling which is extraordinarily confident, precise and sharp-edged. For all its apparent spontaneity, the shading of some loops like the green in Time or the dry brush texture that gives variation in the same work is linked to clear definition and precisely placed horizon lines.

The great feature is 60 small paintings called Plantasmagoria, which combine painting with collage and pencil lines, tissue and all manner of techniques. Though these little works are complete in themselves and full of invention, they serve as sketches for the big paintings. They share the same qualities of joyous lyrical forms that ever so distantly suggest humans in movement.

The large paintings can be amusing as in Lampoon, which is all loops and circles poised above a grey area at the bottom which grounds it. Nearby is a work called Jump where a great big black shape thrusts in from the side and gives a hint of peril.

The work of Rae and Browne is, in a sense, mysterious because in their totally different ways they exert an entirely visual magic.

The work of Peter Gibson Smith at the Bath Street Gallery is much more subject-oriented, appropriately called Wasteland because in some ways it evokes the images of T.S. Eliot's famous poem, with a group of separate impressions collated to make a coherent whole.

The five works are divided into panels, which forces the viewer to look closely at the detail as well as the wider panorama. Because the works are ultimately based on old and faded photographs, the panels are often curved at the top which suggest the curling of old paper but because of the thickness of the panel this makes the appearance of age monumental.

A work such as Vista, which is partly computer generated, done in pencil, encaustic wax and egg tempera, has the bare bleakness of Eliot's poetry. In the foreground, a railway line twisted out of shape conveys disaster; in the background, a desolate pioneering landscape dotted with the stumps of trees shows the fight to build in difficult country. The whole is very evocative of the struggle against nature.

Another memorable work, Hollow, has a different effect of unexpectedness. This is a stony, bare landscape suddenly interrupted by a dark railway tunnel with lines vanishing into the darkness. The tunnel is crowned with vegetation. It is hard to decide which is the more menacing; the arid landscape or the dark womb of the man-created tunnel. It could be an unexpected artefact on Mars.

Each work has its own remarkable atmosphere and personality, yet they are all part of a grand vision of a paradox which unites transience with permanence.

The work of Fatu Feu'u is much more colourful than the largely monochrome images of Gibson Smith but it also unites contrasting material. The motifs range from stylised shapes of hibiscus flowers to dancing spirits and the patterns of fabric and rainbow. It also has a return to movement.

Some of his work is large and lettered with text in Samoan but the most effective of his works are filled with special patterns that are much more than decorative because they hint at a spiritual element in the colourful side of Polynesian belief and life. One large work is particularly powerful because it alludes to a single event - the tsunami of September 29, 2009.

It is called Poutasi, the name of the artist's home village that was overwhelmed. The name is painted as an elegy against a background of dark elemental force.

A wave force bulges out from this darkness, reaching into the neat patterns of everyday life, and beyond that the names of the dead.

This work has many of the characteristic features of Feu'u's work but it has a special place of its own as a memorial to a way of life.

At the galleries

What: New Paintings by Jude Rae

Where and when: Fox/Jensen Gallery, McColl St, Newmarket, to September 10

TJ says: Still-life of simple objects flooded with light and made incomparably rich.

What: Phantasmagoria by Matthew Browne

Where and when: Artis Gallery, 280 Parnell Rd, to September 11

TJ says: An array of small inventive abstract works full of energy and colour; larger versions show strength of line and purpose.

What: Wasteland by Peter Gibson Smith

Where and when: Bath Street Gallery, 43 Bath St, Parnell, to September 10

TJ says: Extraordinary combinations of old photographs, computer-generated images and painting produce monumental dream landscapes.

What: Po Uliuli Poutasi by Fatu Feu'u

Where and when: Warwick Henderson Gallery, 32 Bath St, Parnell, to September 3

TJ says: Colourful patterned paintings give images to the hopes and fears of Samoan people with one big painting an elegy for those hit by the tsunami of 2009.

Check out your local galleries here.