Art: Seeing music of abstraction

By T.J, McNAMARA

Three things are necessary for a successful painting: intellect, emotion and technique. Some paintings have more of one than another. The elegant paintings of Richard Adams at the McPherson Gallery are a small triumph for technique, the control over unusual effects obtainable by paint.

These calm, poised abstractions are a combination of pale areas of colour laced together by energetic lines.

As with most abstraction, there is an awareness of natural phenomena behind the images.

Here the pale blue areas in the upper parts of many of the paintings and the sandy colours of the foreground suggest seascapes, but there is no suggestion that any particular place in indicated.

Cutting across the natural references are geometric lines, often circles that are seen in perspective and therefore become ellipses, and a tight patterning of straight lines.

Yet the principal fascination of these works, whether on canvas or on paper, is the scrubbed, washed-out nature of the surfaces.

Adams' skill shows in the way he organises the compositions with small areas of dense colour counterpointed among the areas of pale colour and, above all, it shows itself in the way his layers of paint emerge and then vanish again in a mysterious but visually compelling way, notably in such paintings as Big Med. The little dark areas become positively playful as they pop out like a signal in Flag.

It is the nature of abstract painting that almost the only way to talk about it is by analogy with music. It is worth noting that Adams has a second career as a much-admired musician. These paintings are variations on a theme. They have a quiet base and sudden arpeggios. Perhaps in this show we get too much of the theme but the harmonies are very appealing.

Surfaces are also very important in the work of Philippa Blair. Every so often she sticks on great blobs of paint that stand a centimetre high on her canvases at the Judith Anderson Gallery. Her paintings are all emotion, dash and flair.

Nevertheless, these works sent from her base in Los Angeles have gained a structure to go with their brio. There is still a reliance here and there on accidental effects, but Blair prepares for the happy accidents more consciously than in the past and loses some spontaneity.

Among the many fine paintings in the show there is one that is utterly captivating.

It is called Madame Butterfly, but the reference is not so much operatic as a link with the huge folded kimono-shaped paintings that the artist has often exhibited in the past.

This painting is constructed quite conventionally. It has a centre panel and two wings. The left-hand panel is wildly energetic with hectic colour. The centre panel has something new in the artist's work: cleverly contrived circular forms in dragged colour that give a sense of balance in the midst of storm. The right panel is enchantingly still, pale and elegiac.

In contrast to the symphonic nature of this work is the jazzy colour and rhythm of Mambo Piano, a long work which has a centre of black and white like piano keys and big, strident percussive notes of red, black, yellow and blue across its surfaces. This is an urban work with a complexity intensified by the quotation of the grid patterns of city streets.

At the Anna Bibby Gallery the work of Peter Gibson Smith is cerebral but none the worse for being so intellectual. These paintings, under the general title Recommended Reading, are remarkable pieces of still life. The technique is egg tempera on inlaid gesso on timber panels. It is a technique similar to that used by ikon painters.

These are a special modern ikon. The timber panels are really blocks in the shape of the backs of books. These spines are lettered in an immense variety of styles. The titles are the titles of real books and they are grouped according to their subject matter.

There is a huge work in the shape of a palette that contains hundreds of titles about art history. There is a work called Whitcoulls which is 1000 books all in a row. There is a group called Reproduction made up of titles such as "The Pill' and "Sperm Wars." There is a work called Random made up of bestselling titles published by Random House.

Although these endless titles make for fascinating reading, no one could mistake them for the books themselves. They are too large and too flat. They work as signs that indicate the immense amount of human thought devoted to particular subjects. And they are also striking because of their varied colour and the way the surfaces have been abraded to suggest wear and tear and the passage of time.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition is a hugely impressive achievement, though one might quibble that the books on architecture stack in an unstable arch while they might have been built in a way that would allow them to stand alone.