Art: Paradise seen in detail

By T.J. McNAMARA

"God is in the details" became one of the most famous sayings about architecture in the 20th century.

In this new century it applies equally well to the centrepiece of the first Auckland Triennial festival of art, Bright Paradise, at the New Gallery.

The exhibition forces the viewer to engage.

This brilliantly curated exhibition requires reading in both the literal and metaphorical senses. It repays intent scrutiny of the details.

The literal reading applies notably to the paintings by Ashley Bickerton, from the United States, which come as a shock at the top of the stairs to the second floor.

Bickerton is represented by two paintings. In The Five Sages five heads grow like asparagus and shout and shriek messages of rage, using all the forbidden words you might see graffitied on the outside of the gallery but seldom in the refined interior.

The paradox is that the heads are vigorously drawn and smoothly painted with great skill. Their vegetable quality is reinforced by the fascinatingly organic way flowers grow out of them.

The contradictions give force to the work. It also has a painterly quality in that the grain of the panel shows through its delicate glazes and we are made aware of the drips and runs of paint as well as the polish it can attain.

In contrast to Bickerton's savage painting is the diffident group of works by Michael Shepherd, which, in a clever piece of hanging, lap around a corner of the gallery.

These small, concentrated, marvellous works are painted in the long tradition of still-life painting of documents in a trompe l'oeil style that tricks us into thinking them real.

They need careful reading, as with their stamps and faded writing they comment on history and who rules in paradise. Look closely and perceive such things as a seal of the German administration of Samoa overstamped with the letters NZ and various other flourishes of bureaucracy.

The rest of the work in this copious show needs reading in a less literal way but requires hard looking and questioning of the artists' purpose.

Why is a male pulling the inflatable in a photograph of a paradisal stream in a photograph by Justine Kurland? What are the implications of the person drinking from her hand in a pool under an overbridge in another of her prints?

What diverse memories are evoked by each separate image that has caught Gavin Hipkins' sensitive eye?

Where does reality end and myth begin in John Lyall's wonderful series of photographs taken while the Auckland Museum, that rich repository of all manner of things Pacific, was being renovated?

In the best modern way the show contains a large number of photographs. The images are of two sorts. The first is the grab shot where a scene is recorded with the minimum of intervention; the second is the staged photograph where an elaborate set-up has been created to make the artist's point.

Both kinds of photograph reinforce the basic premise of the show established by curator Allan Smith: that, natural or artificial, the world especially in the South Pacific offers a bright and vivid paradise but even in the clear bright light there are elements as subversive and as evil as the snake in the grass of the original paradise from which we were all cast out.

This concept is beautifully exemplified in a photograph by the American Greg Crewsdon. This work has been assembled so that beside the bright, jewellery-blue shore of a stream there is an over-arching branch of delicate and lovely cherry blossom. Under the blossom is a raven, bright of eye and sharp of beak, for all the world like the raven that said, "Nevermore" in Edgar Alan Poe's famous poem. In the river is a sinister arm, mottled and dead. Paradise, raw nature and death.

The difficulties of reaching Paradise are emphasised in the number of works that show a turbulent sea.

Most notable here are the cibachrome photographs of Kendal Heyes which have an affinity with film stills but hold their drama in a monumental pose that has a fertile ambiguity that allows the imagination to work, particularly in the last picture of the series, of a dark body swirling in water.

The work of the painters similarly offers detail to be read inch by inch.

It is ironic juxtapositions of detail that make the paintings of James Morrison, from Australia, so potent and our own Seraphine Pick has two ambitious paintings packed with images.

Her Summer Wind answers Colin McCahon's famous indictment of New Zealand as "a landscape with too few lovers," by planting lovers in a range of hills beyond a maze of interpenetrating land and sea populated with attractive bodies and troubled heads as well as an apocalyptic beast. The point is laboured but the truth recognisable.

The mixture of New Zealand, Australian, American and British, as well as the variety of styles and mediums has blended well, with only some strained areas of interactive art - not so much pushing the boundaries as simply making them woolly.

It is a lively and imaginative start to the tradition of a triennial.