Apple back to basics

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue is a mantra for brides but it also applies to art in the Parnell galleries this week.

Something old might apply to Billy Apple. When he arrived back in Auckland from London and New York in the 1970s as a wunderkind, one of his first works was to strip a gallery bare and reveal it as a dedicated iconic space.

And in the Auckland City Gallery he cleared the floor and took the polish off four tiles to increase awareness of the horizontal surface.

Now he has repeated these gestures - which relate to the nature of galleries, exhibitions and art transactions - at the Bath Street Gallery in Parnell, until July 22.

The work is in collaboration with Leon van den Eijkel in a show called 2 Gallery Abstracts Revealed/Concealed.

These elderly philosophical gestures survive as surprisingly fresh. The gallery itself is spectacular. The white walls are varied only by a door, which appears as no more than a pencilled rectangular line on the wall. This is the epitome of a gallery - a white blank space where something connected with art might happen.

On the floor a steel trap has been shifted to reveal the old brick understructure, a drain, and some cobwebs. Archeologically speaking, abstract purity has a rough underpinning.

Van den Eijkel's contribution is the touch of colour - bold, unmixed colour, pushed into the area between the top of the walls and the ceiling at one end of the gallery. These are shades of red, blue, green and yellow that exactly complement the gallery space.

Yet a gallery is a business, so the actual saleable art associated with the exhibition is all banished to the office where, after all, the business of art takes place. The image derived from the gallery floor is a black shape, very similar to those which, in the past, Billy Apple derived from the Golden Section. It is in deep black with one small ping of white that is the steel cover plate.

In keeping with modern art practice the image comes in variants. You can have a painting, you can have a limited-edition print, you can even buy the T-shirt.

All the variants are proportional to each other and the image derived from the gallery uses van den Eijkel's work as a triangular pediment above the floor plan. The wall and door also appear.

The whole makes a precise and elegant design that almost escapes from the context of the gallery to exist in its own right. What is lacking, for all the intellectuality and precision of the work in its various forms, is any sense of emotional involvement so that we admire the comment on art and the market but remain unstirred.

The "something new" is another partnership, this time between Otis Frizzell and Mike Weston at the Parnell Gallery further up the hill, until July 9. The aim of this collaboration is aggressively stated as tearing the Parnell art scene "a new ass" and the exhibition was preceded by a warning: Look out, Parnell, the bad boys of K Road are coming.

The show itself is called, challengingly, Celebrity War Porn. From this you might expect some deep-seated rebellion and wild innovation, but any innovation is all in the presentation.

The images have been sprayed, stencilled and printed on a variety of surfaces in a way that enables them to be produced in editions, although some are one-off. Many of the images are thick with resin, which gives them a raised surface. The colour is sometimes strident and sometimes deeply shadowy.

All are framed with the fronts of the big speakers and adorned with plaquettes in high relief and plastic lettering.

So far, so good, so different. But what are the images? They are mostly borrowed from the past. Che Guevarra, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ as Superstar. Nothing here is shocking, except perhaps the titles.

What we have is a recycling of Andy Warhol. The porn is not porn in the accepted sense, although there are a few opulent female figures around. The pornography is war.

The image called Pornica is filled mostly with the shapes of guns and aircraft.

The ideas are borrowed. Rebellion has become style.

Combined with the exhibition of girly-mag images by Ian Scott further up the road at Ferners, it does perhaps make Parnell a little blue - but it is a pale blue.

Equally spectacular, though much more traditional, are the paintings of Anita De Soto at Orexart, the former Oedipus Rex Gallery in Khartoum Place, until July 21. These are big, well-drawn, Gothic paintings that combine passion, birth and blood.

Several are large circular paintings. Typical of them is All has been Forgiven, where a naked woman with long dark hair, wearing nothing but gloves, confronts the coiling dragon of her own fears, a kind of self-enchained Andromeda.

The mythical element extends to Sub Rosa, where naked lovers reminiscent of Tristan and Isolde have rose bushes springing from their backs to form an arch, just as the roses sprang from the graves of the legendary lovers.

The paintings are never less than impressive but one is totally memorable. A great red centaur with the torso of a woman lifts a child high in the air. Fluids run everywhere, breast-milk and urine, and the enraptured face of the woman is the exact capturing of a wonderful expression. It makes an exceptional first show.