The galleries: Sleight of hand for eyes

De Vries’ Gate to the Garden. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

From time to time the Auckland art scene gets an injection of ideas from outside. Three such shots feature this week, and they could hardly be more different in style.

From Holland originally, now Christchurch, comes Siene de Vries whose Gates to the Garden is at the Edmiston Duke Gallery in Lorne St until May 7.

Outwardly, his work is highly realistic to the extent that the traditional term trompe l'oeil - to trick or fool the eye - applies. The eye is genuinely deceived. It often appears these paintings are done on sections of timber with old, faded, flaking paint. It takes close scrutiny to see they are not fence palings, weathered planks or an old door.

All this would be no more than a skilled trick if the paintings were a reality that could be photographed easily and exactly. Some are, particularly Window, with its pale-green frame, and Cherries.

Self-portrait is a telling part of the show. The artist has depicted himself as strong and melancholy but taking a firm stance in the world. The hint of sadness and things in the past give symbolic depth to the best of the still-life paintings.

In Some Kind of Closure is a painted photograph apparently pinned on the painted boards. It is surely an old love and the cracking and breakdown of the blue paint on the boards takes on a level of metaphor.

A similar work which gathers together all the elements of the style is Gate to the Garden, which also includes a photograph. The leaves that attach themselves to the gate with its rusting lock are black and mournful. Through the boards of the gate, a creeper with a pink flower invades and delicately and obliquely hints that this was once the Garden of Eden.

The symbolic purpose of the leaves is indicated by the way they defy gravity and hold a position against the vertical of fences and doors.

It could all easily slip into kitschy sentiment but keeps just this side of it because the emotional use of colour is subtly handled. Each painting is neatly harmonised in colour but that, too, is a trick easily done. More important is the way the colour emphasises the elegiac mood, particularly when it is unified by a diffused red.

Painting like this is unfashionable and its boundaries are narrow, but in this charming exhibition it is persuasive.

The word charm does not springs to mind at the exhibition from Australia at the Anna Bibby Gallery until May 12. The show is titled UnAustralian, a word that has apparently become one of abuse. It is an extraordinary, way-out, odd show but a revelation of the possibilities of invention.

Most eye-opening of all are two fascinating sculptures by Lionel Bawden. These initially look like lively and inventive shapes, decorated in the manner of Aboriginal art, with endless careful dots on a brown background. A close look shows that the brown is the cedarwood of pencils and the strata of colour comes from their coloured interiors.

One work, Life in Slow Motion, has the pencils clamped horizontally and is a free-standing, folded landscape of intricate hills and hollows, where special dotted strata of yellow pencils give vividness and tension.

Dead Reckoning is darker and more undulating. Here, the pencils are upright and make a coloured edge to the work. From these works that hover on the edge of conventionality it's a huge jump to the sculptures of Huseyin Sami, who makes his work from skins of thick paint. The skins are wrapped around each other and are placed on battered tin cans as a pedestal.

Another piece, Walled Spaghetti, comprises thin ribbons of paint hung in loops on the wall. As a clever exercise it is great. As a work of art it is thin.

Five artists are in the show but the prize of "Australian-ness" in this "unAustralian" show must go to Queensland-born Noel McKenna, whose principal work is a big map of Australia lettered with the names of all the men who have worn the Baggy Green cap. The notes in the catalogue set it in a social context, but the implicit comment in the works is more on art than society.

From applied art comes the striking exhibition From the Netherlands: Words and Images at the AUT Gallery in St Paul St until May 28. This show is made up of magazines, limited-edition books and display material but is dominated by a wall filled with stunning posters advertising art, ballet and theatre.

This display of advanced graphic design is exactly what the University of Technology gallery should be doing. The posters bring together the resources of modern technology to the problems and possibilities of display design connected with cultural events. Every student should see it.