Giant shocks loaded with emotion

Some exhibitions make an initial impact but fade on close inspection. Others offer dense amounts of material to explore after the initial whammy.

Two such strong shows this week need long and careful scrutiny. In one case the meaning is spelled out and explicit. The other has fine detail to absorb and the meaning is more oblique.

The larger show, Giants Saints Monsters, is by James Robinson at the Bath Street Gallery until November 26.

The gallery is hung with a couple of dozen big paintings, mostly hinged to the wall by one side so they swing out aggressively into the viewer's space. The immediate impression overall is of violent attack.

Every sort of texture has been vigorously applied to the paintings.

Their surface is rough with sand and gravel, with pitch, collage and bits of wood. Most of the paintings have been slashed and the wounds pinned together with rusty nails or crudely stitched.

Chris Knox was guest artist at the opening, and the work is similar in mood to a song such as Squeeze played by his band, Toy Love.

The work is mostly in brown, black and grey but there are bright notes of colour where the stitching is vivid red. And there is red in the shining lining of the slashed wounds.

At one point, one of the many holes is backed by a battered tin lid which makes a bright jewel when hit by the overhead lighting.

Covering everything are the messages - endless lettering, large and small, on all the paintings.

There is a huge amount of text - attacks on paedophilia, families, capitalism, government, politics and religion. Any target that could possibly be shot at gets a burst, usually of obscene words.

What pulls all these violent paintings together, as well as their pitchy colour and raucous messages, is a device that links their hysterical Expressionism with classical figure painting. In the best of the paintings is a dramatic large figure or head, or, in one case, a vast bosom.

These giants and monsters give a unity to individual paintings and variety to an installation that would otherwise bellow just one loud, pessimistic note.

At the Milford Galleries until November 19, Zarahn Southon's work has many of the elements of 19th-century academic painting, with careful, detailed drawing of recognisable objects.

What is created by this painstaking care for a sort of realism is a series of big, iconic paintings related to the painter and his Maori ancestry. On some of the paintings is old-fashioned lettering of the kind that appears on Renaissance portraits, giving the date and the age of the sitters.

There is a strong illustrative, narrative quality and Southon's virtuoso painting is of a high order.

Central to his major themes - and more consciously hierarchic - are the pictures of the artist as Maori warrior holding a musket, and the splendid picture of an aged Maori man and a woman standing tall and steadfast.

This is the painter challenging the portrait-painting of centuries past, and succeeding admirably.

Then there is a sudden swirl of violence as he attacks traditional history painting.

A clash of Pakeha, Maori and friendly Maori has reminiscences of Goya - a rider of the Imperial forces is dragged from a horse while a companion is savaged with a mere.

This has a nod to von Tempsky and it is history painting with a modern spin.

The mood of violence turns curiously symbolic in another big painting where a Maori warrior with the features of the artist launches himself at a splendid recumbent nude as he flourishes a suitably phallic taiaha.

The best of these historical-autobiographical paintings is a picture of a hooded mercenary looking down into a deep valley.

Mud, boots, musket, hood and long locks, and the triangular balance of the pose, make a remarkable image. It is a suitable illustration for some grand New Zealand historical novel yet to be written.

Such illustrative art is very much out of fashion but Southan goes his own way with intensity of purpose and a unique set concepts and developing skills.

Equally traditional and even more established in his own style, Stanley Palmer goes his own quiet way in an exhibition at the Anna Bibby Gallery until November 26.

With the skill that comes from experience, he paints the reach of land into the sea and offshore islands floating near the horizon with a soft palette of colour that models the strength of the land and the shadow of shifting clouds on the sea.