KEY POINTS:
The Annual Wallace Art Awards produce a colourful spectrum of contemporary art in New Zealand. The finalists are spread through the foyer and mezzanine of the Aotea Centre.
The variety is such that any dozen viewers would probably come up with a dozen different winners, but three artists were talented enough to win major prizes of money and time overseas to study and work.
It is worth pondering why the judges, Dick Frizzell, Linda Tyler and James Robinson, selected them.
Frizzell was spokesman at the awards ceremony and placed great emphasis on the painter's craft. In his opinion, you had to master the craft before you made art. So, predictably, the three winners had well-made paintings.
The Wallace Trust Paramount Award went to Richard Lewer, with his appropriately titled Skill Discipline Training.
This work is autobiographical, about the nature of the artist's activity. It is painted on billiard-table cloth, pinned to a board like a skin hung out to dry.
Isolated on the skin stands the artist. His state house origin is in the background, the cloth dotted with bright spots of experience, and in the middle ground are all the artist's tools assembled on a table. From nearby his spirit leaps to make an image on a painting.
The painting, on an easel, has a hint of a Renaissance Madonna about it and emphasises tradition. Off to the right are things that impinge on the artist's thinking, such as his interest in boxing. It deftly creates a green and fertile world of one artist and the work of all artists.
Ruth Cleland won the Park Lane Wallace Trust Development Award for a work called Level 2.
A triumph of representation, it is a parking building painted in great detail which gains force by its metaphor. It is an entrance with closed doors but a clear sight of the space beyond. The way ahead is a crossing like a bridge, with a zigzag of ramps to negotiate. The goal is distant though there are pointers along the way to help the handicapped.
The signs on the doors hint at the famous inscription on the gate of the Hell described by Dante. It is this sense of quest, as well as the craft, that lifts this image above the mundane.
Also far from mundane is Heather Straka's work Repeat After Me, which won the Kaipara Foundation Wallace Trust Award. This is Romantic Gothic brought up to date by markers such as modern underwear. It shows a figure against the tiles of a shower box. The tiles are smudged and imperfect, implying a typical Gothic mood of a forbidden or unseen act that cannot be cleansed.
The principal tension comes from the dark glance of the figure, tightened by the way the figure's arms are held tightly behind the back to suggest emotional bondage. It is a brooding, splendidly painted, intense image.
There are a further 45 works in the show of finalists, ranging from a vast funereal black slab decorated with embroidery made with the artist's own hair, through to works that incorporate a laptop, on to pure abstraction, gestural work and a technically sophisticated light display. It makes a fascinating exhibition since many of these works are brilliant.
There are more that did not make the finals on show at the Wallace Trust Gallery. This rich and long-running award has established a great tradition.
One of the finalists in the big award show was Glen Wolfgramm and more of his hectic paintings can be seen at his exhibition Big Time at Oedipus Rex. These big, assured paintings are surely all about the impact of the city.
Predominantly red and black lines slash across the canvas, although here the artist has introduced more green and blue than hitherto.
Everything in these works, no matter how complex, is sharp-edged. This effect is attained not with conventional methods but a painstaking system of masking that produces the sensation of many layers. The technique may be time-consuming but the effect is as spontaneous as classical jazz.
It conveys the rushing lines of tarseal and noise of the city. On some of the more uptight forms, a hint of South Pacific motifs locates the paintings in this part of the world. This effect is particularly notable in a work such as Rain and in Kin, where there is a row of spectators like birds on a powerline.
Emerge, by Scott McFarlane at Milford Galleries, is much more varied in style. His work is illustrative but he has the great gift of conferring mystery on whatever he paints. Sometimes this goes astray and simply becomes puzzling but at other times it goes beyond oddity into an intriguing strangeness of atmosphere and situation.
In the past, he has loaded simple landscapes with a weight of legendary significance.
Some of these new works are in an airy world of myth, such as Submerge where curious clouds hover above a wide sea. A dark figure and an immense hound are on the shore. In the clouds is a winged horse, like Pegasus. and a collection of observing and gesturing gods.
There is a similarly impressive visionary quality, with interaction between hills and sky, in Flight.
New Year Akaroa is an oddity in image and presentation and cannot match the intensely atmospheric Pool Night, with sea and hills cradling a damaged room opening on to a drama where men play games and an excluded female figure watches.
