The galleries: A view from afar of primeval landscapes

By T.J. McNAMARA

Just to paint the appearance of a landscape is no longer possible. Today it must be done in a way that pushes it toward some concept, usually the Romantic sublime.

There are two ways to achieve this. Like Turner, you can bathe everything in a mist that obscures detail and allows the imagination plenty of scope. The other way is the Caspar David Friedrich manner which makes everything sharply defined but with wide horizons and portentous skies.

That both of these styles are still valid is exemplified by exhibitions on opposite sides of Khartoum Place.

At Oedipus Rex Gallery until May 24 is an exhibition by Laurence Berry. He belongs to the veils of colour, the sunset light and the misty distance of the Turneresque school. He has travelled the length of New Zealand to find examples of the sublime - houses, people, vehicles play no part. This is primeval New Zealand. Even when he paints a vast panorama from Paekakariki Hills, the incessant traffic of the road out of Wellington gets no reference. Only the old road over the hill gets a little mention as a track to tie the composition together. He is trying to show us the land as if we were seeing it for the first time and adds to the canvas notes that might be made by an early explorer or surveyor.

His handling of paint is vigorous and the colour splendid. A painting of Camelot River is rich with blue, and one of Doubtless Bay is resonant in the red of a sunset.

This is dexterous and evocative painting, but then there is the literary element. The show is called Field Notes and Studies and every painting is adorned with masses of tiny, handwritten text plus the occasional diagram and direction rose to make it like an inspired page from the notebook of a brilliant surveyor. These notes are stories interesting in themselves and they are often quoted from early sources, but the works are not scraps, they are paintings. These field notes are hard to decipher and pull the viewer's nose against the painting, contrary to the effect of the scene itself which needs to be viewed from a distance.

This is in many ways an admirable exhibition, but the writing should have been in a catalogue, not on the painting.

Across the piazza in the John Leech Gallery until May 21 are paintings by Mark Cross, New Zealand art's most gifted outsider. These paintings, the result of years of patient work, are remote from any of the fashionable movements.

Understandably, given the detailed nature of his work, exhibitions by Cross have been infrequent and also because he has spent of lot of time in Niue, whose rocks and wide horizons provide a setting for much of the work. Almost all of these paintings are marked by wide, distant sea and above the horizons there are skies which set the tone of each work.

The foreground is occupied generally by rock formations characteristic of Niue or rippling sand or wide fields of plants. The sharp depiction of these things is a tribute to the painter's highly developed skills and meticulous draughtsmanship. Beneath these skies and on these detailed landscapes people act out enigmatic dramas.

In the single most impressive painting, the detailed foreground is an intricate mass of bones: skulls, spines, shin bones and thigh bones. On this darkling plain, a sea of people kneel and dig endlessly, seeking their destiny. Astonishingly this grim but extraordinarily powerful painting was inspired by the memory of people digging on a beach for buried prizes. It is a stunning example of how the ordinary can be converted into an artistic image of the highest order. The uncountable mass of people that reaches to the horizon is convincingly painted. One soul is naked and vulnerable among this multitude.

Nakedness has a special significance for Cross. Several of his paintings show figures not artistically nude but naked to the world and whatever life may bring. Yet it is a fine balance. Sometimes these women are statuesque, at others perilously close to pin-ups.

Work as finely detailed as this is usually done on a small scale, but what gives these paintings their impressive presence is size, and one of the biggest embodies a remarkable concept. The work is called Dichotomy and Conciliation and has two configurations. In one, two young women on a shore look away from each other and are confined by the towering Nuiean rocks that enclose them. When the paintings are reversed, the women look toward each other and there is conciliation and horizons are wide open on either side. This is no gimmick but a striking symbolic device.

The best of the paintings are unique. Some works have conventional concepts behind them or are simply a display of patient virtuosity. When the sky and horizon are absent and there is a pre-occupation with depicting swirling water, the paintings lose a large measure of their symbolic force.

Nevertheless, this is an outstanding exhibition and, mercifully, the artist, who writes well and extensively, has done it in a book and not on the work.