The galleries: Portraits highlight traditional methods

Eleanor Wright's Mr Prebble. Picture / Dean Purcell

It's a paradox when a long-established artist seems radical and a young artist conservative, especially when their exhibitions are a stone's throw apart.

At the Gow Langsford Gallery, Max Gimblett- resident of New York and internationally recognised - is presenting Banquet, until April 8. The pieces are stylised and abstract.

Across Khartoum Place at Oedipus Rex Gallery is an exhibition called Sky Burial by Eleanor Wright (until April 1) that is made up of traditional portraiture and figure painting.

Gimblett's big paintings are done on his now-familiar quatrefoil shape and he supports them by ink and pencil drawings. These are multifoliate patterns developed from roses, stylised because the petal shapes have been struck out with a compass in a highly sophisticated and elaborate version of the simple patterns everybody used to create at school.

On the quatrefoil shapes he paints charged gestures, mostly in black, which brings the ground colour into play. The colour can be a deep purple for Night Sky, a green for Sky Walker and a pink in The High Place.

In the ink drawings, colour is first carefully applied within the geometric shapes then, while it is still wet, other tones are dripped, splashed and flooded on to it. The colour is delicious in The Rose of Paracelsus, dancing and lyrical in Fandango, and restrained subtle shades of brown in Half Lotus.

Some exceptions to these shapes catch the eye. A large work called Knight is a new shape - something like a shield and emblazoned with rollered shapes like a vivid, colourful assault.

In the gallery's window is a painting in complete contrast to the rest since it has no gestures at all. It is a quatrefoil which is simply an exquisite surface covered with Japanese pewter leaf in a way that makes the applied metal distantly echo the outlying shape. Called Silver Castle, it is serenely beautiful.

It may be that Gimblett's works look best in isolation. Another painting, which stands in solitary splendour in the window at 33 Lorne St, gives its name to the show. It has all the fine qualities of all the rest of the images with the extra majesty of lines in gold.

Eleanor Wright, in her first full exhibition, seems much more conventional. The figures in her work are forced into corners of bare rooms, with their spirit exemplified by the birds, live and dead, which haunt the same rooms.

In a traditional religious painting, a Pieta called Mother Mary, a woman with a halo has the dead body of her son spread across her knees. Touchingly, the bird is a brightly coloured, fluttering spirit that escapes from the son's mouth. The religious aspect is not forced but the humanity of the figure is emphasised by the nakedness and the raw genitals and skinned knees that add to the pathos.

Pathos too is in Keith, a straightforward portrait that emphasises the statuesque subject's loss of an arm. The emotional charge of these big nudes is exemplified by the withdrawn and depressed figure in Bed of Birds, where the birds express stress and dead hopes.

The colours of these figure paintings are not exceptional and the drawing sometimes falters as it describes a hip or the articulation of hands. But a work such as Mr Prebble - a highly competent portrait of a shaky elderly man - combines likeness with symbolism in the three birds on the wall in a combination that says much for the artist's intensity of purpose and future potential.

Daniel Malone, at the Sue Crockford Gallery until April 1, is in mid-career and his work is an extraordinarily curious mixture expressed in the title of the exhibition, Still with Still Life.

Frequently he simply lets things speak for themselves. An extreme case is his work Dumb, Dumber Dumbest, which is a set of easily overlooked water bottles in three different sizes.

Often there is more intervention. Aloe Vera Cruz is a cross adorned with crowns of thorns made by cutting and spreading plastic bottles.

The results of the artist's invention are mixed. Globe of the World is a plastic cola bottle where the lid has been stuck on the wall and the bottle screwed in, so that it stands out horizontally. It has been covered with fruit stickers from throughout the world.

This is no more than a clever trick, but Cluster Bomb, a sculpture suspended from the ceiling and made up of 50 different plastic bottles sprayed with automotive paint, is a powerful work full of suggestions of melancholy, technology and menace.

Seldom has an exhibition moved so freely between the utterly trivial and highly inventive. What is impressive is sometimes simply the nature of the objects.

At other times, the works take force from the artist's intervention, but little is really visually exciting and nothing lifts the spirit.