Abstracts that comment on life

By T.J. McNAMARA

A rose is a rose is a rose," defined Gertrude Stein a hundred years ago - but would that ardent supporter of modern art have recognised that the rose in the work of Yvonne Todd, the winner of the Walters Prize, is a barbed comment on sentimental New Zealand society, a sharp indictment of kitschy tastes in greeting cards?

The clever, award-winning work makes such a statement and the purpose is valid, according to its publicists.

It is a credo for artists and critics to comment on, illuminate and celebrate art and its relation to society.

In Auckland this week, aside from the Walters Prize exhibition, are three shows by older artists and one triumphant show by a younger talent that do just that.

At Artis Gallery in Parnell until August 11 is a show of landscapes by Don Binney and Gerda Leenards.

Throughout a long career, Binney has played the role of illuminator of how we see our landscapes. Birds and Binney have become almost a cliche and the exhibition at Artis fulfils expectations in this matter. Big kingfishers swoop down in several paintings.

Binney specialises in scenes from Auckland's west coast areas, such as Whatipu.

Here, as always, he tries to distil the essence of the landscape and mostly leaves out the human element.

He might give us the essence of Whatipu hills, rocks and beaches but he does not include the navigation lights that mark the perilous exit from the Manukau.

He has some trouble with colour, making Little Huia Valley full of chemical green, and defining hills with an implausible black line. Black and white is really his medium and the single best work in the show is a presentation drawing.

The exhibition is completed by works by Leenards which, small or large, do the dim, mystical thing with the New Zealand landscape.

Also in Parnell, at the Warwick Henderson Gallery until August 4, is a big exhibition of paintings by Nigel Brown called This Human Place.

He is a commentator. For him humanism is all. If our past is dominated by men, he indicates it symbolically by a big penis in Man Art Humanism.

The effort to make everything symbolic often obscures just what a good painter Brown can be. It is refreshing to see at least one painting from as far back as 1973 when he did a series of paintings of One Tree Hill.

The accumulation of symbols in a big painting such as Of Flying and Falling is not much more than a banal catalogue, but to balance this there is some effective commentary made in Brown's unique style.

As well as urban disillusionment he has painted a New Zealand icon, the man in the black singlet, and there are times he brings this off splendidly.

A typical work, On the Land, with a resolute figure against a background of steep hills and overarching sky is such a painting.

He is conscious of his role as commentator. An outstanding painting is You've Asked Me to be Philosophical where he ponders on the place of a New Zealand couple in gumboots by the sea and their bright pink bach which intrudes its fortress shape on the landscape.

There are no fortresses or figures in the paintings of J.S. Parker at the Judith Anderson Gallery until August 2, yet his abstract work is based on acute observation of New Zealand. It is a song of celebration of our rivers and pastures.

All artists have their favourite colours and Parker's work is most powerful when it uses blue and yellow/gold. Paint trowelled on with a palette knife suggests running water wonderfully in River Blue and there is fine, bold work where the gold/yellow gleams between grey and blue in For Brancusi.

There is also a new generation of artists who commentate, illuminate and celebrate, and outstanding among them is Michael Hight, whose exhibition runs at the Gow Langsford Gallery until August 10. His development as an artist has been fascinating.

He began as an abstract artist emphasising the nature and texture of materials. Then he had a stunning exhibition where the surfaces of stacked beehives made a display of colour, weathering and pattern. In this show the beehives are placed in the landscape of Omarama in the South Island.

This is fine landscape painting which renders exactly the hills, the stones, the dryness and the isolation of the region. But it is much more. This is celebrating New Zealand, its strangeness and its emptiness and the curious interaction between humans and the landscape, although there is not a person in sight.

In the foreground of every painting there are stacks of beehives, painted exactly and realistically. They are as still and as enigmatic as Stonehenge yet the viewer is aware that within them there is a hive of activity. The bees are building what James K. Baxter called "the citadel of instinctive wisdom".

Landscape and hives are linked by rocks. Everywhere in the paintings there are bare rocks, notably a large, splendidly realised heap of rock in Benmore but also superbly in Glenburn, where each hive is topped with a rock to hold the lid against the wind and where every rock is realised so exactly in the light that it takes on an individual personality.

Light floods these paintings and creates shadows that give a dream-like effect despite the fierce sharpness of the images and confer on the scenes a special atmosphere in this place isolated by the mountains.

Nothing is left out - not even the goalposts on an improvised football field which act as portals to this special place captured by the artist's skill and observation.

Impressive, but too reactionary ever to win a prize?