Art: Authoritative Frizzell makes region his own

By T.J. McNAMARA

Among some fine things in the FHE Gallery's Summer Exhibition - notably a splendid female torso by Terry Stringer and a remarkable drawing by Bill Hammond - is a photograph by Marti Friedlander, who will be given the tribute of a retrospective show at the City Gallery next year.

At FHE she has a characteristically black and white photograph of a bay on the Coromandel Peninsula. The bay is sharply characteristic and the steep hills and isolated buildings of corrugated iron define a place that is typically New Zealand.

The focus of the photograph is not the landscape, which is the setting rather than the subject, but an intense moment of spirited conflict between the three boys playing in a couple of dinghies on the beach.

The photograph does what photography does well - it catches an expressive but never-to-be-repeated moment when one little boy clenches his fist and where laughter will turn to tears. The human moment is made sharper by the holiday context.

Similar steep hills and corrugated iron buildings are found in the paintings of Dick Frizzell at the Gow Langsford Gallery, although the scenes are from Hawkes Bay. There are the obvious physical differences between the works. The paintings are much larger and in colour; the photograph has the shiny surface of coated paper but the paintings are done on canvas and the marks of their making are clearly apparent as surface texture.

The major difference is that one artist uses a mechanism to seize a moment of time while the other is using a hand process to record and suggest what is not momentary but is consistent and lasting.

Frizzell's show is titled Welcome to Sunny Hawkes Bay; he grew up in the region. In the gallery window is a gag tourist poster extolling the attractions of the area. The work inside the gallery is much more serious.

These paintings have the authority of considerable size and an absolute precision in placing the touches of paint that are the equivalent of what is observed.

A feature that gives them even more force is the play of light and shade and the control over tone that conveys atmosphere.

The light is strong, hard-edged and remarkably different from the soft delicacy of the work of Stanley Palmer in his book which came out last week.

Where Palmer's works are tinged with a melancholy that made the images incorporate the past as well as the present, Frizzell's work has a clarity and precision that images the present and the possibilities of the future.

In his career Frizzell has adopted many different styles, from abstract to faux naive. Here there there is less self-consciousness than usual - just concentration on making an intense and direct painted image.

The outstanding painting is the exceptionally large canvas The Peak, full of drama, from the riverbed in the foreground, to the dark trees, to the strata of the cliffs - clear as a diagram but full of life in the painting.

The dark shapes of trees play an important part in many of the works, but in From Puketiritiri Road it is the dark hill in the foreground as well as the pattern of fences and roads that energise the work. Frizzell is very good on roads - witness the sudden drop from sight and reappearance of the road in Country Road, Elsthorp.

He is also good on the sudden oddity of the geometry of country buildings and on the flat surfaces of ponds and dams.

All these paintings hit so exactly the nature of the scene that they make it typical of the region as whole. This is not the symbolic depth of the great tradition of Romantic landscape but the work of a splendid painterly talent giving a vital response to a well-known region. It deserves a title like Our Place.

In the epoch-making exhibition Te Waka Toi, two of the most majestic, even terrifying, pieces in the exhibition were upright, carved chests for bones. They were stylised torsos surmounted by heads.

An impressive variant of the shape has been used for ceramic figures by Manos Nathan at the Mitford Gallery. These tall ceramic figures have the same guardian presence as the traditional chests but without the funerary purpose. The carved decoration has been modified to raised patterns and incised carvings that supplement the shapes very effectively, particularly in the carved lizard on Whakapakoko II and the relief decoration on Whakapakoko IV.

The shape is also modified to carry monumental birds. The carved ceramic is particularly lively in the tail of Tauihu II and weight allied to energy is seen in the crouching Whakapakoko Tutei. They add up to a very powerful exhibition special to Aotearoa.