Gay, decadent, and brilliantly done

By T.J. McNAMARA

Frequently the art scene in Auckland is enriched by the work of artists from overseas who are visiting and exhibiting here.

This week there is a spectacular exhibition of photographs by Anthony Goicolea from New York at Artspace, which runs until the end of May. His work is gay, decadent, and brilliantly done.

The work is modern because it uses digital technology in imaging and computing.

It is also historical since the mood it offers contains the gender-bending ambiguity that was characteristic of the end of the 19th century.

The show is full of self-portraits of pretty boys. By the miracle of digital technology Goicolea repeats himself in an endless variety of postures. It is Cindy Sherman crossed with Robert Mapplethorpe, to startling effect.

The pretty boys are all dressed like public schoolboys. They have shirts and ties, blazers and shorts and expensive footwear. This is Lord of the Flies country, without the desert island. All the boys look like choir boys - wide-eyed, beautiful and talented - but underlying the lovely exterior is menace. Not only is there the unease of adolescent sexuality, there is also death.

Bullying among schoolboys, in a setting of Gothic doors and old stonework, leads to death and a heap of corpses in Pile.

The beautiful boys, only two this time, stand outside a window and mock and lick in Window Washers, and in the long, superbly photographed work called Warriors, which turns around a corner in the second gallery, the boys advance menacingly with the hooks, spines and sharp edges of agricultural implements in their hands. Two works break from the public-school-uniform imagery. One is set in the Newmarket swimming pool and the chest-hairless adolescents substitute tight bathing caps and goggles for uniform. The colour is predominantly blue and the composition is stiffened by the handles of long nets which ambiguously may have been used to save or to drown corpses floating in the paddling pool.

What is remarkable about this work is the extraordinary variety of poses, each accurately observed.

Look, for instance, at the way a figure on the left of the work tucks his hair under his bathing cap.

The ambiguity is at its richest, most decadent, most paedophile, in Before Dawn, where some boys became cherubs gambolling in the snow while others stand with plaited hair that specifically conveys a feminine image their genitals contradict.

There are exact parallels for this work in Symbolist paintings of the 1890s, notably in the paintings of Jean Delville. As often happens in Symbolist painting, the background is a dark forest which is a symbol for the unconscious mind from which such preoccupations emerge.

This is a brilliant but almost extravagantly sophisticated show. The ghosts of Sigmund Freud and Aubrey Beardsley roam these woods haunted by Mahler's music.

Sophistication of another kind is offered by Susanne Paelser from Germany who is the Elam Artist in Residence. She has five small paintings at the George Fraser Gallery until May 11.

She is a sophisticate of the 21st century - post-postmodern, determined never to be "old hat". She rejects pretty colour. She rejects frames. She rejects painting on canvas. She rejects tidy composition.

These paintings are square, painted on thin board and each one has a precise circle partially obscured by little flourishes of paint. The rhetoric of big gestures is also rejected.

If you read the circle as a moon, what remains is an illusive atmospheric effect.

In her press release the artist says she is interested in the cliches of art but likes to show that time has passed since those cliches were current. She says her work is sceptical but scepticism breeds scepticism, it breeds opinions rather than convictions.

This work may seen slight but no doubt it has its value in an academic situation where it helps students to question the nature of painting practice.

Another aspect of sophistication is apparent in the work of Jasper Krabbe from Holland whose work is on show at the Muka Gallery in Ponsonby until May 16.

He has produced lithographs with the Muka Press but the body of his work here is a series of small paintings of memories of New Zealand. They are charming works and demonstrate that Krabbe can paint in any way from a realistic portrait, to an atmospheric dream, a lovely nocturne (Night is one of the best paintings), a vigorous expressionism or a neat and evocative sense of isolation. He has command of a cool and effective palette.

It is an attractive, clever, unassuming show.

Finally, a touch of colour is provided by Marc Rambeau at the Lane Gallery. This Sydney-based, French artist is showing until May 3 and the emphasis is dashing colour.

He uses bright red and orange to convey the heat of the Australian landscape in simple shapes dotted with hints of shrubs. These work best when they are done on textured papers that give a sparkle of light.

By contrast he does appealing nudes with a big sweep of the brush in the Chinese manner, perfectly prepared to sacrifice the anatomy of an arm to give a hint of breast. The best of them is New Lines, a languid odalisque, although she seems a bit out of place in the hot orange landscapes.