TJ McNamara: From simple beauty to hard truths

Mary McIntyre's 'After the Op', a meditation on the fragility of life. Photo / Supplied

In art there are many different kinds of truth including poetic and architectural truth. The work of Mary McIntyre, who has two exhibitions in Auckland, seeks the sort of truth poets find by self-analysis. She has a big retrospective at the splendid Pah Homestead in Monte Cecilia Park. It contains many portraits - drawings and paintings - and she is excellent at catching a likeness.

Her self-portraits establish the uniqueness of her place in New Zealand contemporary art. Expressionist painters often do great swaggering self-portraits but McIntyre's analysis of herself goes much deeper in a way allied to her precise technique. It is typical of her work that it ranges from a small round drawing of herself as Mona Lisa (easily overlooked as it hangs from the ceiling) to a painting of herself after a triple bypass operation.

This painting takes its remarkable quality not only from the battered post-operative demeanour of her countenance but from the exactly painted skull alongside her head. She also includes the attachment on her neck with the tubes that enabled her to be hooked up to various support systems. This painting is in the long tradition of memento mori, a meditation on the fragility of life, and it is merciless in seeking out a personal truth.

The second exhibition, at Whitespace Gallery, comprises mostly of paintings of nude men and women. There is one deliciously colourful portrait in the window but the paintings in the back gallery are such that a generation ago the show would have been closed by the police. They have an unblinking view of the female nude that aligns her with uncompromising artists such as Lucian Freud or Jenny Saville.

Anorexically thin or opulently large, these women are unflinchingly portrayed. Each has a character, whether it is dependent on prominent bones or the luminous skin colour of a large woman. The show is rightly called Unease, and the uneasiness extends to the paintings of male dancers and two curious works from a Red Room Series where unconvincing wrinkles on male nudes look imagined rather than seen.

In the front gallery, the ardent conservationist Nic Moon expresses her concerns about our exploitation of animals, whether we shoot them or milk them.

It is a most attractive show, with exquisitely accurate paintings of insects and the transparency of their wings, painted in cow dung. As specimens the paintings are accurate but the peculiar medium has no special extra quality.

Its real force lies in an installation called The Inner Sanctum, where six strange fetish objects surround the bones of a cow arranged on coal. Each of the six hanging "wild things" is a skull, with ears, to give the effect of attentive spirits of hunted things, honouring the bones of the centre. What gives these figures grace is the use of flax milled into rich golden fibre.

The fibre comes into its own in a special object called A Blanket for Richard Henry. The blanket is intricately woven of flax, wool and possum fur. It is a tribute to a man who in the 19th century saw how much our native birds were menaced by introduced animals but found his conservation efforts defeated by the way rats and stoats could swim to the island sanctuary he established. Their tiny skulls give a hidden menace to this rich blanket.

Architectural truth is about how paintings, particularly abstracts, are built up. At Two Rooms veteran abstractionist Stephen Bambury has a show of geometric abstractions. He uses the basic geometrical shapes of crosses, rectangles and squares. To energise these basic shapes and make us aware of their potential he builds in little shifts so one shape may shadow another. Others are tilted just out of symmetry. He makes his surfaces interesting by making them flow or bubble in unexpected ways, or with variants in colour. In one work, SC119164, three shades of black are conveyed by delicate gradations of surface.

The paintings, done on aluminium panels, are mounted clear from the wall to assert their individuality. Each is assembled as an architect might design a faade except the tilts and variations give a tension that make them art, not planning.

Only one work ventures to be different. It comprises 21 aluminium panels, all with a black surface, and all quadrilaterals. The panels play optical games. Gathered together on one wall they defy you to see them as flat. They all seem headed towards vanishing points but each has its own point. Individually they would be nothing; collectively they tell a truth about perception.

Upstairs at Two Rooms is work by German artist Joachim Bandau, with an example of the style he has shown here before. It demonstrates the visual truth that if you layer thin veils of transparent grey on paper eventually the piece will darken to black. His transparent veils of colour have exact edges and are evenly transparent. There is surely a mystery in the making of these delicate images.

It is a pity there is only one such piece because his other works in the show use panels covered with black or red lacquer that has been traditional in Burma, we are told, for 1000 years. The panels are neat and rich but the effect is what you might see on any Chinese lacquered box.

At Starkwhite, an exhibition by Matt Henry contains one ordinary truth: position changes paintings. In the brilliant white of the upstairs rooms he has a plain painting set near the floor. It looks like a red radiator. Another room has a partition wall that is a double-sided painting. Elsewhere paintings masquerade as television sets. Art is made ordinary.

There is one special experience. A stepladder allows you to climb out on to the veranda roof, walk a few steps and climb through another window into a white room where a little white painting might be a light fitting of some sort.

The trip along the veranda is the real experience of this show, which is called Vernacular Painting. From the roof last week you could see painters doing their version of vernacular painting on the buildings opposite.

At the galleries

What: Retrospective: Mary McIntyre

Where and when: Pah Homestead, 72 Hillsborough Rd, to May 28

What: Unease by Mary McIntyre

Where and when: Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, Ponsonby, to May 7

TJ says: These two exhibitions reinforce this artist's ability to coin uniquely strange and remarkable images from her personal life and observation.

What: South by Nic Moon

Where and when: Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, to May 7

TJ says: The artist's concern for conservation issues an ambiguous installation and a lovely tribute piece notable for the use of golden flax fibre.

What: Noh Time by Stephen Bambury; Recent work by Joachim Bandau

Where and when: Two Rooms, 16 Putiki St, Newton, to May 14

TJ says: Bambury is showing geometric abstraction on aluminium panels in his long-established style but with one telling work installed directly on the wall. German artist Bandau has a fascinating work done in veils of watercolour and some less remarkable lacquered wall sculpture.

What: Vernacular Painting by Matt Henry

Where and when: Starkwhite Gallery, 510 Karangahape Rd, to May 14

TJ says: Henry plays games. He shows that if you put a painting where you expect an ordinary object, it becomes an ordinary object. There is an added frisson: you have to climb out a window to see the full show.

Check out your local gallerie here.