The galleries: Emond took no prisoners

Martin Emond’s remarkably skilled works are filled with a violent energy

Art is hard to define. Some people would not consider Martin Emond's work art, but one theory suggests that anything shown in an art gallery is, by definition, art. Galleries are varied in purpose and nature, and define art in their own way according to their values and audience.

Emond's work is at a new gallery on Karangahape Rd in a tribute exhibition titled Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

The gallery is in a spacious area underneath the tattoo and clothing shop Illicit, and the show runs until May 27. Martin Emond, who died last year, was born in Scotland, raised in New Zealand and made a big name for himself in the underground world of adult comics in California. The exhibition consists of a lot of original work - drawings, tattoo designs, paintings and mannequins with elaborate decoration.

It must be said that the man could draw anything. There is an early drawing of birds that could have been done by a specialist wildlife artist. He chose to dedicate his remarkable talents to the blatant, aggressive pulp world of illustrated stories.

Everything he did was filled with a fine savagery, like the band Guns'N'Roses which he so much admired and alluded to in his pictures, particularly notable in the satirically violent series White Trash.

To create this work he isolated himself in a room for a year. It is not quite Michelangelo alone in the Sistine Chapel for years, but something akin to it in terms of intensity. The result was a savage narrative where Elvis is resurrected as the spirit of denial and destruction. He makes a Faustian pact with a grotesque devil to achieve one more hour of fame in Las Vegas.

Here, as everywhere in this show, the desire to break all taboos is reflected in the violence, the explosions and the sheer energy in the drawing of everything from cars to weapons. The energy extends to the characters Emond created. Cowboy Girl is loaded with every kind of fetish detail - hair in plaits, spurs, boots, guns and semi-nudity. The whole figure twangs with tension and rhythm.

Emond tapped into many areas of contemporary design. He did covers for a Japanese collector series, Rolling Red Knuckles. He did posters and a big painting with the sad title, Born to Lose. He took from conventional comics, such as the charming Calvin and Hobbes, and electrified his borrowings.

His own back was decorated with a huge tattoo of Calvin. But a version he drew, called Switchblade, is shifted from respectability to something savage and ironic.

His output was immense. It is sometimes horrifically bizarre. It is fascinating but is it art? It is surely, but it is the art of an extreme vision.

At the other end of the spectrum, at the Jensen Gallery in Upper Queen St, is a light, airy, cool, white space devoted to exquisitely refined minimalist abstract art. The middle-of-the-road viewer would probably reject the painting there with a glance as quickly as they would reject the comic art.

Callum Innes is one of Britain's leading artists. The paintings, on show until May 27, are geometric abstraction with a difference.

His large works are divided precisely into four or five large areas. Some of the areas have an immaculate white surface and some have a deep, intense black. Between these extremes there is one area of colour - violet, grey or in one special case, cadmium red - that mediates between the intensity of the black and the white.

This area of colour has veils of thin paint that wash down the canvas. How this transparency, coupled with movement, is achieved is an impenetrable mystery even for other artists. Amid this delicacy and balance the paintings are tensioned by allowing a little bleeding where the geometric areas meet. It is a delicate thing but it gives depth as well as energy.

Subtle effects are the key to the quality of these big canvases filled with the rarefied air of abstract art.

The absolute minimalism of a work such as Agitated Vertical on White where two white areas are separated by a narrow channel of bare linen is given guts by the irregular edge of the channel and its slight slant. Similarly, the huge and complex surface of Resonance is agitated by small cracks through the surface of the paint as well as the underlying colour. Instead of Guns'n'Roses, we have the visual equivalent of the music of Philip Glass or John Adams.

There are few boundaries when a prominent academic artist shows installation art at a public gallery. Te Tuhi at Pakuranga is host to a large maze-like work by Deborah Crowe. Her usual work is beautifully crafted boxes within which are lovely arrangements of coloured nylon thread. At Te Tuhi she has been given the space and sponsorship only a public gallery can supply.

Crowe has masterminded the building of a mass of timber framing, typical of housing construction.

As you go through the maze you come upon little artistic surprises - abstract sculpture in painted wood, mirrors, screens, and the arrangements of nylon thread, sometimes small and sometimes bigger than in the past. All these little visual surprises are charming, inventive and clever but the huge, commonplace framing timber overwhelms everything. The unlimited opportunities that a public gallery can confer have subverted the work of an exceptionally talented artist.