The galleries: Dark versus light in mind's rough terrains

By T.J. McNAMARA

Some artists make a landscape of their painting while other artists paint landscapes. You can see the contrast in Parnell this week, and it is also a contrast between dark and light.

In the big exhibition by James Robinson at the Bath St Gallery, his 25 black, sombre paintings are each an individual, separate, created landscape. The exhibition is his first in Auckland and runs until November 29.

His powerful terrains are created by painting and by obsessively cutting, slashing, gluing, stitching, nailing and spreading gravel on the canvas so the surface becomes a special place of hills, valleys and surface incidents like no place on Earth or even the Moon.

These mindscapes, full of direct attacks on the surface of the work, are the intensely personal expression of dark, turbulent emotion. The great German painter of the second half of the 20th century, Anselm Kiefer, used tar, pitch, straw and seeds, string and wire in his vast compositions and Robinson follows in his wake.

The difference is that Kiefer is full of social awareness and the workings of myth and history, while Robinson's work is the outcome of personal incident and emotion.

The impressive achievement of these big canvases puts Robinson in the forefront of New Zealand artists. It is a painterly achievement in that no photograph can reproduce the relief elements, the textures and layers of this work.

The sense of attack, destruction and inadequate repair, which in some cases distort the rectangular shape of the paintings, is matched by an abundance of tiny details - flowing squads of marching figures and unexpected faces. In one case are hidden rubrics of "fear, sickness, lies and empire".

In these paintings we feel the painter's angst by participating in his physical actions and decisions. We empathise with the way he creates a dark surface scattered with stones and is then moved by inner pressures to slash and hack at the surface. Then he desperately tries to stitch it together again, but the wounds leave scars.

We also participate in the way veils of darkness spread across the painting and dark paint runs down the surface like weeping. For all this attack there is an element of artistic calculation that shows the theatrical surface is not achieved without some organisation, notably the use of red underpaint.

Often there are layers of black underneath the surface cuts. Rivers of intense black on the surface are also velvet, along with lace and sacking and mirror glass.

Each painting has its own character. The characteristic colours are shades of resinous, pitchy brown, some of the work is lighter but hardly less disturbed. These disturbances rarely reach into space, though they sometimes subside into gloomy fogs as in Into The Void, in many ways the least arbitrary of the paintings.

Everywhere any hint of calm or even transparency is contradicted by tangles of wire or aggressive directional arrows.

One title sums up the exhibition. It is so scary it is hidden around the corner. It has a vast wound at its centre with the edges pulled back as with retractors at an operation and a black area at the top resembling a flayed skin. The centre is wound and genitals. The work is called Raw Power.

This exhibition has great force, but is an intensely private show full of private decisions, worries and fears. The impact is more disturbing than any single work. When Robinson links with more public concerns he has the potential to be one of our most gripping painters.

The light is up at Artis Gallery where Peter Siddell's exhibition (until November 30) is the antithesis of James Robinson's. The paint is not the landscape but the subject is.

Siddell's work is small, bright and has his special quality of light. It is precisely done in the artist's established manner, using his usual subject matter of green hills and suburban houses penetrated by bays of water with no sign of activity on the streets. There is the brooding presence of memorials.

These paintings are instantly familiar yet are composite landscapes of nowhere in particular. They have the distinction of creating a special Peter Siddell world, tidy, colonial and just a little bit strange. They are all sold.

One room in the City Gallery also offers contrasts of dark and light. In a creative piece of curatorship, Robert Leonard has carefully assembled a small exhibition around a telling work by Colin McCahon, done in 1945 at the end of the war.

McCahon images are frequently about light in the darkness, and here a light bulb and its reflection shine like a good deed in a naughty world. Paradoxically, the filament of the bulb is black but nevertheless it works as a symbolic, modern beacon.

The work is accompanied by the welcome resurrection of seldom-seen works from the collection, such as John Nixon's remarkable constellation where the stars are minute chips of eggshell, and Roger Peters' ambiguous loop of red-hot wire, at once appealing and dangerous, sexy and painful.