Art: In Dibble's shadow

By T.J. McNAMARA

An array of fine exhibitions this week is eclipsed by the work of Paul Dibble at the Gow Langsford Gallery. He knows exactly where he is coming from. His intention is to make big bronze sculpture in the grand tradition that goes back to the Greeks and even into legend.

Like a Renaissance artist, Dibble has a big studio and a team of assistants. And, like a Renaissance sculptor, he turns out work large and small.

The small works are often marquettes, models for the large works, and it is a tribute to the artist's invention and skill that his work withstands enlargement to an over-life-size scale.

The small works are delightful because they possess that rare quality in art, especially in sculpture, of good humour and wit alongside their serious purpose and undeniable decorative qualities.

Of the small pieces the most impressive is Linked Stories of the Garden, which is a quartet of forms: first, a waving leaf, then a dancing woman, then a version of a torso based on a sculpture by Brancusi and finally an interweaving of two plant forms, all collectively evocative of delight in form and what might be in gardens.

The most ambitious work of all is Getting the Measure of the World, with a male figure between two enormous leaves.

The figure, as is usual in Dibble's work is very thin in section and complete when seen from either side. Unobtrusive but very positive rhythms link it with the leaves on either side. The leaves are notable for their stems which have the form and presence of bones. They are also marked by a pattern of veins and parallel lines within the areas defined by the veins. Like most of these large forms in these sculptures, they are supported by curious props like branching crutches.

Together these grand figures make up as fine an exhibition of sculpture as has been seen in the city for many a day.

Jeena Shin at the Ivan Anthony Gallery in Karangahape Road opens her third show of her precise, subtle, geometric abstractions. For Saso Sinadinovski, a newcomer at the Chiaroscuro Gallery, subtlety is beside the point; grim energy is everything as horrific figures evolve around an evil eye.

John Papas at the Warwick Henderson Gallery has a variety of preoccupations. In some work he wants to make brightly coloured, energetic abstract forms which he calls Magic Sea. In other works, less successfully, he wants to convey the spirit of Greek heroic legend in Icarus, Pegasus and Ganymede.

In two of these works he is concerned with the beautiful, heroic male body. This leads to a series of illustrative works about the relationship of Alexander the Great and his companion Hephaistion. The most consistent series is a group of still-life paintings on Greek themes which push no great ideas but are complete and fully realised in themselves, notably Still-life in the Greek Style No 6. Lesser aim but surer hit.