KEY POINTS:
Abstract art is a pure, even puritanical, art of visual effects. Although it can be joyous and celebratory, there are no narratives, no polemics, no illustrations, which is why it transfers so easily to design.
This week, Auckland features three good exhibitions of abstract art and they show that this essentially 20th-century style is not yet exhausted.
At the Jensen Gallery in Upper Queen St until November 25 Jim Speers is showing an exhibition of lightboxes called Bluebird.
The lightboxes have reflective backs, fluorescent lights, layers of vinyl and diffusing acrylic fronts. Each one provides different combinations of rectangles of floating luminous colour.
In old exhibitions when paintings were hung high on the wall they were said to be "skied". Speers gives this new meaning with his lightbox called Small Sky, a beautiful cloudy blue, displayed high on the wall near the ceiling.
Variations in tones of blue make this one of the simplest of his works. Green Pocket has shades of green with a yellow centre, while Suomenlinna hints at a northern Finnish landscape with its yellow and blue and defined geometric shape.
The most complex work is Recording Angel, which shades imperceptibly from blue at the top to orange at the bottom with a strong patch of red on the right and, on the lower left, dark, luminous shadow.
These are beautifully made glowing glass boxes filled with soft, coloured light. What makes them different from a well-designed sophisticated display case is the carefully calculated quality of the colour, which allows us to see the process. They retain an element of mystery and the sense of innovation of new ways of celebrating light.
McPherson Gallery has more sense of a particular source of effects in the show by Richard Adams that runs until November 18. These works on canvas and paper show mastery in the handling of paint. Although they are abstract and rely on shape and colour, there is more than a hint of their origin in the rubbed, weathered, faded, painted planking of wooden ships in the Middle East.
One of the finest is called Dhow. It is not a picture of a vessel but it shows braided rubbed areas, horizontal lines, a dash of red like a water line and the bottom part is dark. Black circular forms suggest pegged timbers.
The composition has a sense of movement that is unusual in abstract art. The colour varies from soft, faded colour with dry paint brushed over dry paint to give a sense of age to sudden interruptions of strong intense blue often signalled by a decisive horizon. Blue Interrupted makes a strong bid to be the outstanding painting in a masterly exhibition of what paint is still capable of in conveying fascinating visual effects.
In Artis Gallery, Parnell, until November 26 is the work of veteran abstract painter Don Peebles, who has held an honoured place in New Zealand contemporary art. As well as being a painter he is a constructor.
This show is of small works rather than his big, elaborate folded constructions of the past. But they are still often contained within a raised, enclosing wooden frame, a device that emphasises their autonomy as abstract works of art, and each has its own small, intense collection of effects.
There may be a piece of tarred paper fixed to the frame with a portal that seems to lead through it. This is a visual effect linked to the work's cream background. Elsewhere, these clouds of loose paint may be counterpointed by fine lines and small geometric shapes that act as grace notes. There are no big rhetorical flourishes in this show, but everywhere is deft and inventive control of design and paint.
It is often said that Monet's late work of clouds reflected in water with water lilies was like abstract art as if that were a virtue in itself. There is more to Monet than the fact his work sometimes looks abstract.
Nevertheless, the process of using the reflection of clouds on water and the play of light can be taken to the abstract point when we recognise no particular place or thing but only an abstract cloudiness. The big paintings, by David Morrison at Vavasour Godkin Gallery until Saturday, hover successfully in this region. Through the mists of his delicate brushwork we dimly perceive the reflection of trees near water whose quality is conveyed by hints of ripples delicately brushed across the surface of the work.
The effect of these paintings - called Study of Lake - is undoubtedly charming, but the colour is restrained and muted where it might sing.
