The galleries: Plenty of riches right here at home

Herb Foley's Fan Shield combines observation, thought and painterly technique to capture the essence of New Zealand bush and birds.

Returning to Auckland after time spent in the galleries of Europe could be an anticlimax. Not so. The Auckland art scene is full of interest with international and national artists.

There is even a corner of Europe here, by way of New York. It is on the lower floor of the Auckland Art Gallery's Wellesley Wing, where Americans Julian and Josie Robertson have loaned part of their splendid collection.

Right next to Albert Park we can hook into the painterly energy of Picasso and the vivid colour that the Fauves such as Derain and Vlaminck found and expressed in the port of Collioure in southwest France at the beginning of the freedoms of 20th-century art.

Among other splendid things is a beautifully poised Cezanne and - in total contrast - a soft, atmospheric evocation of the Baltic by Emile Nolde.

Great riches in a little room, the exhibition continues until February 23.

More recent international art is here, thanks to the entrepreneurs of the Gow Langsford Gallery. When they found that one work by Bernar Venet - a French artist who moves between Europe and New York - at four tonnes was too heavy for the floor of their gallery, they found a showroom on Lorne St that would take the weight and made the piece available to passersby.

The big pieces in their gallery on Kitchener St are equally impressive and typical of the large, vandal-proof abstract work in steel that Europe uses in parks, streets and public buildings.

Of the four major pieces, the ones called Lines are more original than the geometric ones with interrupted arcs, although all are done with assurance. Indeterminate Lines is a work in two pieces, where rolled steel bars are forged into big coils - gestures, fixed in three dimensions, and made monumental.

The square section steel bars have been hammered to look almost organic in form.

In the one-piece Intermediate Line, the hacked ends of the twisted bar gape like mouths and rear like snakes. The forging of the bar gives energy, tension and movement to go with the weight, strength and monumentality.

Venet has been showing since the 1960s and the arc works are a development of his earlier minimal and mathematically based style. They have a strong sense of enclosing space but also allowing an escape. The sculptures are on display until March 11.

From closer to home is Do You Realise, a show of photographs by Patrick Reynolds, at the John Leech Gallery until February 25. These black-and-white works emphasise the special quality of our West Coast beaches, capturing the surge of wave against the rocky headlands of Piha and Karekare.

They are a mixed bag. Those with children in them are limited by being close and personal, but the best convey the mists and remoteness of the beaches.

One photograph of a child sliding down a sand dune on a boogie board is at once as personal as a family snap and as remote as a moon landscape.

New Paintings, by Herb Foley at Oedipus Rex Gallery until March 4, are obviously less linked to a particular place. His deeply meditated account combines observation and thought with a painterly technique to make paintings that capture the essence of our bush and birds. Obliquely, they make an eloquent plea for the preservation of all natural things.

A work such as Joseph's Dawn shows the light through the trees in the background and the play of light in the dense foliage of the foreground. It is a dancing, lyrical work, a persuasive and encompassing image of New Zealand bush.

Another work, Flax, has sword-like patterns in the foreground that may owe something to Rousseau. A dark passage at the bottom of the painting gives a sense of the past by showing fossils as well as the small creatures that lurk beneath the surface of the ground.

The most inventive of these works is Trees, where the intricate patterns of foliage and the hidden geometry of the composition are extended by areas where the rich green of the bush at dawn is allowed to run and dissolve to suggest moisture and the refreshment of rain.

It is matched by lower areas where the red sky of evening is equally atmospheric but has a hint of danger which gives tension to the generally idyllic mood.

One fascinating aspect of the paintings is the detail hidden in the complexities of their delicate brushwork. Oval Shield has frogs, snails, lizards and insects hidden in the dense plant growth, and Round Shield has small narratives that show the progress from the primeval, through felling and work with tractors, to the tidy housing and recreations of suburbia.

Labelling the tractor as Progress may be a little too obvious but in no sense is the message of these paintings preachy. They present delight and allow the viewer to absorb their quiet, almost religious tone.