Art: Siddell reconstructs high and mighty

By T.J. McNAMARA art critic

Construct, not as a verb but as a noun, has become a very fashionable term. Books, paintings, philosophies and even sciences are described as such.

The meaning intended is that the artist has taken aspects of reality and reassembled them to express an independent reality of its own.

The word suggests a dry assemblage according to a prearranged plan. Yet good art has an inexplicable element of inspiration and response that creates mystery, a magic that goes beyond something assembled from a theory.

At Artis gallery in Parnell, Peter Siddell - in his exhibition Three Points South - is showing paintings that refer to his fascination with the Southern Alps in his mountaineering youth. In many ways the treatment of rocks and scree resembles the images in his first exhibition of headlands and hills more than 30 years ago.

Most of Siddell's work since then, though apparently sharply realistic, has been a bringing together of elements taken from different places to evoke such things as the feeling of the houses and hills and the glimpses of sea that are the character of Auckland. These paintings are more related to specific places yet they still have the same sense of being constructed.

The big, spectacular work Fiord, which depicts Mitre Peak, pulls the valley to the left of the peak up closer so it becomes the spectacular amphitheatre. The depth of the sound is dramatised by light on the water and by the swoop of a saddle between hills on the right. It is the process of making an image that is not the mountains but a dream of the mountains.

The lovely work Gillespie's Beach from Main Divide January 1958 was painted this year from memory. What the artist is doing is recapturing the memory of glimpsing, from high in the alps and across the clouds, a distant hint of coastal beach and waves. A vision of a farther shore.

The mountains and, particularly, the ridges that catch the light on their sharp edges are very accurately conveyed, but it is the sense of the mystery of the distant beach that gives the work its element of magic.

There's also a canvas of exactly the same dimensions which shows the reverse situation. Titled The Main Divide from Gillespie's Beach 2000, it looks from the beach to the mystery of the mountains. It is an equally fine work. These comparatively small paintings consistently achieve that extra element that gives intensity to the image.

The larger works are more heavy and solid with a sense of strangeness all their own. They represent a remarkable achievement, particularly in the painting of skies. Yet here and there are curious discrepancies of scale. Siddell is very good at showing the steepness of the hills and the way the scrub crawls over them across the ridges and into the valleys, but his high mountaineer's point of view does not allow for a human scale. Obviously, houses will be dwarfed by the mountains but in Lake their tiny presence is beside the point. Even in Window, an interior view, the wall and the window are a formal device rather than a portal to another insight in the natural world.

The work of Jim Speers at the Jensen Gallery in Upper Queen St takes from the world no mountains or beaches but only colour and light. From these the artist constructs a separate reality which is a glowing box of light mounted on the wall. If this were just simple colour these would be no more than display pieces, but within each box there is a play of colour and shape that produces soft tensions and a complex relationship of light to space as some shades advance and others recede.

Most of the boxes are rectangular but some have inset elements that contribute an architectural weight, notably in The Brothers Corner.

Each box has a different character depending on the combinations of colour diffused through its misted surface. Palace Radio 1 is an arrangement of glowing pink, soft-edged rectangles; Palace Radio 2 balances resonant reds with yellow; and White Interior gains its resonance from white light that is more distant than the colour around it, which seems to fall into and be absorbed in its space.

All these soft areas of colour interact in this way and it is the softness of this glowing light with no apparent source that confers mystery.

In the smaller gallery at Jensen's, Speers has other work that does not rely on fluorescent light. In several of them it is mirror glass that is the special element, isolating a painted surface so that it floats. There is also a work in quilted cloth which is inventive in the way its two parts are linked - but is lifeless, dead on the wall.

These two exhibitions are radically different but each in its own way is combining an individual point of view with well-established construct convention. They both represent a high level of accomplishment, but break no new ground.