The galleries: Stark and unsettling perspective 

Des Helmore makes us look again at familiar scenes in works such as Looking Back.

Reputation has odd vagaries. Some artists attain it early. Des Helmore, whose exhibition Random Encounters is at the Anna Bibby Gallery until June 4, has waited a long time.

He was at art school as long ago as the 1960s but paintings have appeared only rarely and a few at a time, yet they have been notable for their quality. Why this reticence? Why this isolation?

Perhaps it is because it has taken a long time. All sorts of movements and revelations in art have emerged before Helmore's tough combination of precise abstract values and acute observation of the passing scene could strike a chord and be recognised as a valid synthesis in an art world devoted to extremes.

The paintings in this show not only combine severe abstraction with buildings, landscape, sea and sky, but achieve something entirely his own. His stark portrayals of buildings, walls, seats and signs, railings and landscape combine with a curious palette of muted colour to have a disconcerting effect that makes us look again at familiar places.

The signs are important. In one of his paintings, the trade name "Renaissance" is blazoned across a building and, equally tellingly, the painting is called Looking Back.

One aspect of the work is that Helmore is looking back at the studies in perspective that preoccupied the early Renaissance. He is looking back at the bright, clear light and the careful placement of objects in the space created behind the surface of the painting without entirely losing surface effects. The surface, particularly in skies, is often delicately painterly.

The New Zealand inspiration for his painting is exemplified in Deck, where the railing of a typical deck in a home overlooking the sea goes deep into space in perspective. Light strikes the top of the rail and creates dark shadows on the deck. A touch of strangeness is given by a discarded shoe on the planking and beyond the railing there is a long, low horizon.

It is the shoe as well as the light that provides the oddity in this painting. Elsewhere it is supplied by tradenames that give a strong hint of irony as well as establish familiarity. The signs that support them have a special part to play in the composition alongside the railings and poles with no apparent purpose.

When Helmore takes his eye off particular objects and simply makes his shapes jump and dance the effect is not so individual or powerful. The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Rabbit is a jagged and lively piece of abstraction but loses impact from lack of particularisation.

Despite the inclusion of such experimental work, this show of nearly two dozen paintings should do much to lift the public reputation of a mature artist hitherto admired mostly by other artists.

There is no doubt about the wide reputation of Marian Fountain, whose work is at the Edmiston Duke Gallery until June 4. She is well known here and in Paris, where she lives and works. From time to time she comes back to her homeland with an exhibition. This show is huge, with several hundred works.

This is possible because she works mostly in the field of small bronze sculpture and her works can be made in editions of four or five. Her reputation was founded on her work as a medallist and there are some lively examples on show.

Her most fascinating work is tabletop sculpture, particularly when she uses the table edge, as in An Annunciation, where a figure is sprawled with hair and hand over the edge of the surface. The figure, as often in Fountain's work, has spreading bosoms and a fine haunch which gives surprising weight to such a tiny work.

Whenever this artist deals with the female there is always an unusual and expressive approach. This is notable in the one moderately large sculpture called Squeeze, which combines a figure and a hand. Hands are everywhere in the show - always with a symbolic as well as decorative purpose. Liberte, one of three shaped like a violin, not only has a rich red patina but is marked everywhere with hands of acclamation.

Two other themes run through the show. One is the idea of growth, visualised as opening fern fronds, seeds and patterns of chromosomes. The other has surrealist effects, not like modern surrealism but reminiscent of proto-surrealist Hieronymus Bosch. Many works show an insect-like abdomen which gives birth to hands or little fountains, or anything that links the human and the insect world.

The abundance and invention of this show reflects a richly deserved reputation and is matched by the distillation of experience in the exhibition by Greer Twiss at the gallery at 40 George St, Eden Tce.

Lately, Twiss has worked at contrasting the winged shape of albatrosses with man-made cantilevered demonstrations of support. Against deft pieces of engineering are poised the free shapes of swooping and soaring birds in spectacular movement.

In Yoke the birds are compared to the smallness of humankind. Beyond all theory and explication, these lovely works reinforce the established reputation of the artist and also show a new kind of freedom.