Art: The small details which make up a life

By T.J. McNAMARA

Some paintings make their impact all at one go; others are a series of incidents that act together to make up the work.

At the Judith Anderson Gallery this week are two exhibitions where the works are a whole collection of painterly incidents. Equally effective, they make a study in contrasts.

Patrick Malone was considered a most promising artist a few years ago, though his exhibitions had been seen only at fringe locations. He has been off the scene for a while, but is back with a rush with this show called Beat Driver.

The paintings look like a series of very colourful city-scapes, but close inspection shows that these elaborate compositions are not made up of structures but stacks of abstract forms. The movement across the painting is not a city journey but a life journey.

Each stack is made up of a series of incidents all expressed as rectangles. Some are big and bold, some intricate and maze-like. Some are filled with tiny detail, others are a series of repetitions, such as a whole run of similar verticals.

There is in these various incidents a special kind of bright naivete, especially in the colour, which is that of toys or children's games.

With these paintings, you have to let the eye make a journey and add your own experience. You say to yourself, "Here I am in a quiet time; here I am agitated; here I am lost; here I am forging ahead; here I feel good; here I am heading toward a high; here I am at the top and I am looking out; here I am looking in," and so on up and around the whole painting.

Despite the apparent naivete, there is sophistication enough to give each painting a special character. Bridge Life is a complex stack supported on a solid blue girder-like base. I'm a Disco Dancer makes a heavy start of the left, then jives across the painting with all the elements getting smaller and livelier until, on the right, it ends with a mass of tiny, vibrant elements that climb to a peak like a lark ascending.

The most spectacular work, The Beat, is an immensely elaborate composition of major incidents, some moving across and some compressed by the weight of others. There is also small series of minor incidents inside the arcades of bigger forms. It all leads up to starry towers which stand out against the blue.

All these incidents of the moods of life are paraded like sweets or goodies except in Downtown Krakatoa, where the whole comedy is based on dubious, awkward props and looks really unstable.

The almost unvarying mood of bright, lyric optimism is the only limitation of this lively, clever show which gives abstraction a special new spin.

The 96 incidents, each on its own tiny panel, that make up the work A Day in the Life by Mary McIntyre - which shares the exhibition - are not abstract but dryly realistic. Yet in the same way as the Malone paintings, they make up a life journey.

In the centre of the work the panels make up a landscape which depicts the shoulder of a hill with two black animals presiding like gloomy thoughts. Around this scene are the incidents that make up the imaginative life of the artist. Rangitoto, which has featured so much in her painting, is there along with accurately drawn likenesses of relatives.

Other images range from angels taken from Leonardo to landmarks, monuments, feet, nudes and a smoking candle. Not all are equally effective. The panel that says "Evil is not Nice" may have a true sentiment but looks stylistically out of place.

There is a subtitle to the work, From the Uttermost Ends of the Earth, which is where New Zealand is. In its own neat, idiosyncratic way, McIntyre's painting just about sums up where we are all at.

The delightful exhibition Italian Hours at the City Gallery is a series of incidents too.

The incidents are not the work of one painter but a collection of encounters made by 100 years of New Zealand painters communing with aspects of Italy.

The view is invariably Romantic and a long way from the modern reality of miles of apartment blocks and busy motorways. This is picturesque Italy. The works have been ably assembled with knowledge and taste by the assistant curator of the Gallery, Kendrah Morgan.

It is intriguing to see what caught the attention of individual artists in details such as the doves on a pergola in Oliva Spencer Bower's picture of the Piccola Marina on Capri.

Everywhere the overwhelming impression is made by contrasts of bright light and shade, notably in Robert Proctor's lively paintings of markets.

It is also instructive to see what Frances Hodgkins learned from the Italian in New Zealand, Girolamo Pieri Nerli. Her superb painting Red Sails, on loan from Dunedin, is very similar in handling to his picture of Portovenere borrowed from a private collection.