The Galleries: Dashing, rich and audacious

Robert McLeod's 'Landscape with Exotics'.

This week there are two big shows sauced with eroticism but very different in content and style. One artist is improvisational, the other carefully calculating. The questions posed by their iconography are complicated by an ultra-modern sense of irony.

The apparently spontaneous improviser is Robert McLeod, whose show at the Edmiston Duke Gallery runs until June 30. Most of the paintings are dominated by long, slinky pale-pink female forms around whom the rest of the action revolves. And what a convocation it is. The chattering classes surround the figures. They touch, maul and argue. They even examine the world through a telescope.

Sometimes they retreat, red with embarrassment or rejection.

One has a face where the mouth is laced like a football.

The feeling of spontaneity applies to the paint, which is extraordinarily dashing, rich and inventive in its thickly textured, painterly way.

The improvised quality extends to the lively way the big paintings spill across the floor as if the energy cannot be confined to one surface.

Even single figures have a foot not on the skirting but on the floor itself as if everything has to have some contact with the ground.

Yet the painting is done on plywood, cut out to give space between the figures and some elements that fly off to the side.

The technique gives a vigorous outline that is always writhing with energy.

What is created is a village where all sorts of people interact. The people are caricatures that owe a little to Mickey Mouse but more to the fine savagery of the adult comics that replaced children's comics when animated cartoons took over on television as fodder for children.

In these crowded groups - notably in Giving Colour to Mr Serious and Landscapes with Exotics - there is a huge variety of incident. Fingers are everywhere, tongues too. The female figure is gripped in a hand in Sci-Fi Flash.

The two versions of Nasty Surprises have the woman menaced by phallic bananas, while flowers bloom in the most unlikely places.

In Landscape with Exotics the whole gossiping, steaming group are acting out parts in front of hills. A dark figure lurks behind.

The hot pools spill on to the floor. Critics are blinkered. Brains are exposed. There is a deftly painted Scotch thistle about to be strangled. Is this a reference to the painter's origins?

Is, ironically, the thistle a noxious weed in this lurid landscape?

Everywhere there is wit, imagination and delicious feats of paint and design. McLeod is irrepressibly his own man.

The comic element salted with irony and wit is also part of the art of Ian Scott at the Ferner Galleries in Parnell. But where McLeod is hectic and expressionist, Scott is cool and referential - and aware of a certain part of 20th-century American art history.

His game is the interplay of the extreme abstraction of American artists such as Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, with images of the provocative models that strip to their underwear for soft-porn magazines. These he paints in the manner Mel Ramos made famous in the 1960s for Playboy.

Their huge breasts and prominent, bright red, improbable nipples dominate the foreground of every painting. Pop Art is re-born.

In the background are versions of abstract paintings done with as much skill and authority as the underwear babes.

Because Scott works on a large scale the effect is often audacious and full of technical confidence. The contrasting images are linked by subtle visual rhymes of shape and colour.

In Model Series No 69, the Noland in the background has a red dash above a series of lyrical circles with a prominent centre.

At the bottom of the painting is a neat, rich, fertile green. The corresponding model has a red mouth. Globes for breasts and her fingers pulling down her briefs emphasise her crotch.

Colour correspondences of red give life to No 71 with the girl against a Stella, and black links a dark girl with another Noland of chevrons.

Most audacious of all poses a girl making melting gestures down to her crotch against a hint of the drips and runs of a big Morris Louis painting from the Melbourne gallery.

These shapes are at the edge of a vast expanse of white that emphasises the one-plane surface philosophy of Clement Greenberg, who influenced the American painters of abstraction.

It is a challenging work.

Is this surface of white as interesting as the dripping laces of the poster girls' white miniscule underwear?

The best of these paintings is diamond-shaped with a woman at the centre, her strong profile echoed by the chevrons of a Noland and with earrings that reinforce the work's strong vertical centre.

The blatant authority of Scott's work is impressive.

The ironic comment on the nature of visual attraction is effective. But there is a sense that men are indulging the last temptation - admiring the right thing for the wrong reason.

There is an interesting comparison in the treatment of the nude female figure across the road in Parnell at the Artis Gallery where, until July 2, Mary McIntyre is exhibiting some paintings and her characteristic pyramids.

There are nude women - done in McIntyre's carefully drawn, rather dry manner - but these are women observed and painted by a woman, so there is a sharp truth to reality and the women are of all ages.

The exhibition does not have the huge impact of the Scott paintings but the quality is more than comparable.