Art: All-rounder just what we need

By T.J. McNAMARA

If John Pule did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. He is in large measure something that New Zealand/Aotearoa and the Pacific needs at this time.

This artist, novelist and poet creates special South Pacific forms of expression that use some European idioms when they are relevant to him, but always remains true to his Polynesian (Niuean) origin.

He does this successfully and with intensity. His novels are set texts at university, and now he has the accolade of a show at the New Gallery of the Auckland City Gallery as well as an exhibition at the nearby Gow Langsford. The dealer gallery show is a sellout.

This does not mean that Pule's painting is easy to approach and understand. It has something of the appearance of traditional tapa-cloth painting, and the three large works at the New Gallery are complemented by two excellent examples of the traditional decorated cloth, called haipo in Niuean.

The traditional work is purely decorative, but Pule's work - a system of symbolic pictographs - is highly hermetic and personal.

One approach is to see each work as a journey. The paintings are all linear. They travel.

This sense of journeying is more apparent in the more recent works at the Gow Langsford. These represent a departure from Pule's more familiar style in the three big works at the New Gallery, where Pulenoa Triptych centres on a compass rose that spreads like an explosion in the centre panel. This panel is full of images of flow and change in a variety of idioms that talk of new horizons.

The left-hand panel has some monsters, splendid in their vivid bony outline. Attention is paid to the gods of growth, sky and water. Throughout the work the penis, the Cross and a hill like Rangitoto are demonised. In contrast, the right panel contains stylised star maps as a spiritual guide.

As well there are Pule's familiar groups of figures - in line under the sun and a hill with three Crosses - who are lamenting, as if by the waters of Babylon. At the bottom of the work a soul is eaten and spat out again by a monster.

The second work, La: the Sun, uses a unifying green colour, and most of the ranks of images are about being caught and held, weeping.

The third work is a narrative illuminated by drawings which recount the double death of a Niuean god, first killed by the missionaries and later by being put in a museum as a curio and finally being discarded. These works are not howls of protest, but a retelling, building up the images of memory like stills from a film.

In the works at the dealer gallery, the journeys are not from panel to panel but along dream-lines in formal patterns. As the eye journeys along these lines of life and force it is stopped by a variety of episodes which are often very isolated.

One of the drawings that accompanies the show puts the process poetically:

My heart is my road

My eyes two restless travellers

My mouth is the roots of the Kaina

that has a way to penetrate earth.

The Kaina is the house and the home.

One painting is almost completely abstract with regular episodes suggested by red dots that are like some Aboriginal techniques. In another, Clear the Pathway, there is a clear passage between red and black veins and the episodes end with tiny images, each like a question.

Hoko (Arrived) is an intricate weaving of fine lines in a wave pattern with occasional images that end with a flower and the poet as victim.

The paintings are given a special quality by the way the lines and images are smudged and rubbed to soften their focus and symbolise that, despite the preciseness of the drawing, nothing is ever entirely clear and unclouded.

The two shows are an impressive guide to the achievement of an artist who has a special place in our collective culture.

At the Chiaroscuro Gallery, Ian Kingston calls on references to European culture that range from atrocious puns about Poussin through to Courbet, Diaghilev, Degas and James Joyce - all with a dash of Freud. This burden adds connotations to his scenes but also tends to lead him away from his usual firm handling of paint into fussy details that work only on first viewing and do not have a life of their own afterwards.

But these are lively works, often hitting the mark with situations and characterisations that will strike a sympathetic chord with many viewers.

The exhibition is shared with Jacqui Colley, who paints women striving to know the contents of enigmatic boxes set by the sounding sea. The effect is grey and disturbing.