Hiving off in a different direction

By T.J. McNAMARA art critic

Astonishing. There is no other word for the stylistic change made by Michael Hight in his exhibition Northern Landscapes at the Gow Langsford Gallery.

He has changed the nature of his expression from abstract to realistic and yet the basis of his art remains essentially the same.

He is recognisably the same artist, his preoccupations remain the same. Many of the shapes on the canvas are the same but what was formerly geometric abstraction is now depiction of stacks of beehives exactly rendered in accurately recorded landscapes.

Hight has always used special surfaces related to place. Weathered textures on wood and stone as well as substances as varied as wax and sandpaper have been the material of his art. These were arranged in geometrical patterns, along with material found at specific sites, to evoke a sense of place and time in areas as distant as Italy and New Zealand.

It was possible in 1988 to hail him as being at the forefront of our abstract artists. All changed.

These are highly representational works and convey particular places, but where once Hight might have arranged found pieces of weathered wood or timber in a geometrical pattern, he now paints with great exactitude the wooden ends of boxes stacked up to make a beehive.

These stacks are placed in landscapes in a way that confers on them a presence that is monumental but at the same time strange and slightly sinister.

The hives are part of the landscape and yet intrusive.

Representation is only one level of these splendid paintings. Each group of hives is varied in colour but each one makes a special harmony of its own so that Waihou presents a variety of faded blue tones, while Te Kauwhata plays variations on pink, brown, white and blue and Waitakere is a sonata in grey.

There is a further level. The paintings are very still, but though no bees buzz around these hives and there are no signs of humans, we feel that the bees are part of a process of extraction. These structures are there to feed on the landscape and its hills.

Yet bees are essential to fertility through pollination.

These curious manmade structures are in their own way a seeding of the countryside however plain and open it may be.

In one of the most impressive paintings, Waitakere , the contradictions are expressed by a light foreground and a dark gully beyond. In this painting the hives march along a ridge in single file like so many alien soldiers.

At this time of post-modern art it is customary for artists who favour abstraction to abandon its purely formal qualities for some link, usually ironic, with reality. This remarkable exhibition works in exactly the opposite way.

The beehives painted by Hight are, in a sense "found" objects. He has sought out the subject and found examples.

The whole business of "found" objects is a prominent part in contemporary art.

The exhibition by Chris Mousdale at the Chiaroscuro Gallery has works where found objects sit alongside accurately drawn and painted areas in elaborate constructions that are somewhere between wall relief and paintings.

The result is atmospheric but seldom dramatic.

It is notable that the one work that is truly dramatic, White Suit, Flaming Head, with a head of blood and flame and blood on the floor as dancers tango in a tense relationship, is almost completely a work of painting.

But when Mousdale wants to evoke the faded but attractive world of South American music, he collages found pieces of paper relating to Carmen Miranda, who became a symbol of that aspect of South America.

The work, Deconstructing Carmen, is accompanied by little shelves of mementoes.

The whole show is about Brazil and Brazilian music, with vividly painted images of oranges and persimmons to convey the light as well as exotic colour and sound.

It is the clever work of a considerable talent but only occasionally rises to the tensions and resonance of Samba , a work featuring a pair of pears, a cupboard and text that is not a text.

Frank Womble is a master of found sculpture who has not exhibited in recent years. This makes his small retrospective show in the smaller gallery at Lopdell house particularly welcome.

His particular skill is to combine a found object leaning forward with wheels to suggest obsessive, frenetic forward movement. When he does it simply as in Bird or Zork or Zark , the effect is more striking than when the assemblage of wheels becomes complicated.

The main gallery is given over to an exhibition of work by Gretchen Albrecht as a print-maker. It is organised by the Sarjeant Gallery and will be reviewed later.