A cool wind blows

By T.J. McNAMARA

The word this week is cool: icy cool, cool style and cool grey.

Icy cool is the work of Richard Thompson at the Gow Langsford Gallery until July 13. He calls the show Antarctica but do not expect explorers' huts or penguins. There is only the white of ice and the cool, pale sea and light on snow.

The style is cool, too. It is reductionist, taking everything to its minimal expression. There are only two forms used: an arc of a circle and rectangles.

Each piece has something of the demonstration about it. In Glacier (one) the arc goes upward. In Glacier (two), the arc, green on pale pink, goes down. Glacier (three), even more pale on pale, is reminiscent of Ad Reinhardt's paintings in one colour. The Kelly Ice paintings are demonstrations of smooth surface against texture. A DVD showing on a screen demonstrates how movement might be added.

The paintings pale into insignificance beside the three big minimalist sculptures that dominate the gallery. They stand tall in immaculate white against the white walls and the bleached floor.

Though these sculptures have been sprayed with thick white paint, the viewer knows instinctively they are steel because of the precise edges; the steel emphasises their monumentality and weight.

Yet nothing could be simpler than these structures. Ice Tower stretches from the floor almost to the ceiling, a simple structure of rectangles but impressive in its cool massiveness. Frozen Falls are two semi-circular arches intersecting at right angles and bolted at the top. Most monumental of all is Iceberg, the third structure in the 16mm steel. In no way does it have the irregular form of an iceberg but it does have massive, startling projections.

It is remarkable that the same form projected on a flat surface in the painting Ice Shadow can seem equally coherent but visually quite distinct.

The exhibition as a whole rams home the thought that minimal art to be really effective must have an architectural size. But it is cold and, like the continent that inspired it, is an end. You can go no further.

Different scale suits different mediums. Watercolour works in a small format when it is concentrated between sharp limitations and when each work incorporates just one visually appealing, technically clever, gesture.

The 20 works by Matthew Browne at the Artis Gallery until July 14 are all called Collective. On immaculate paper within the confines of a circle or rectangle one colour is washed transparently across another, exploiting the gradations possible in the watercolour medium. Both the horizontal and vertical swathes of colour are graded in density. The horizontals finish in drips of thick body colour.

Each of the paintings offers a deft, intriguing interaction of geometry, colour and cool technique.

Art comes from the gut or from the brain. Thompson and Browne are "classical" in taking everything away until the core is revealed. The alternative Romantic method of adding layers of emotion and ideas is exemplified in the cool, grey, melancholy paintings of Star Gossage at Oedipus Rex gallery until June 28.

These paintings are wrung from the painter's emotions and experience, not from theory, and are keyed to the painting Two Tiki and the World is Your Oyster where a dark, distraught figure has plastered white on her face.

They move through the curious mythology of Milk, with its three layers of the world where the mountains feed the earth and the earth feeds the Earth Mother with a tiny touch of white. Wanganui Farewell is intensely personal with two figures drifting out from the mountains yet maintains a mythical dimension. Still personal is Meet me in Te Aroha where a figure reaches forward with a dream flower in the palm of her hand.

There is high drama in Out of the Gate, a gloomy, dark, even cold landscape painted with considerable subtlety presided over by a vision in the sky. Always the work is strange but richly emotional, even when the image is no more than three trees on a hill.

The conscious naivety which, at times, is at odds with the subtlety of the landscape painting can seem an empty mannerism as it does in Gorse up in Flower but all in all this third show by Gossage reinforces the feeling we are seeing the emergence of an important talent inextricably linked to this land.

In the smaller gallery at Oedipus is the first show by a young artist whose work has also grown out of a traditional Maori base. Natasha Keating does images of Maori women on irregular planks of native timber and confers on her images considerable dignity and a special character conveyed by the unusual medium of ink on wood.