The galleries: Marvels of the mundane

By T.J. McNAMARA

Painting relies on the viewer finding a truth through perception of colour, form, composition, subject matter, human interest or philosophy. The puritan tendency of 20th-century art often concentrated on just one of these elements, but an artist who combines a number of them can create meaningful paintings.

Such an artist is Philip Trusttum, whose show at the Warwick Henderson Gallery (32 Bath St, Parnell) runs until October 26.

Trusttum is a veteran. His output is huge and of uniformly high quality, except for his very small works where his style is lost. In this show the outstanding things are the biggest things. Two are upstairs on the mezzanine because there was no room for them in the main gallery.

Trusttum's starting point is the mundane small truths of life: putting in a fence or mowing the lawn. Ordinary tasks and ordinary objects are transmuted into wonderfully colourful, decorative paintings full of visual energy.

Profound ponderings on life and art are not for him. He takes aspects of the subject and works them into an impressive composition, so the act of mowing the lawn becomes a samurai pushing a strange and colourful device.

Black earmuffs become a helmet. A shirt and collar become a splendidly decorative pattern, such as something by Gustav Klimt, and the mower becomes a flickering whirlwind of dancing blades. Even the mechanism that raises and lowers the cut has its place.

The whole combination works because of the rhythmic energy of Trusttum's shapes and his unusually inventive colour sense, always unexpected but always right.

It is matched by mysterious techniques of rubbing, painting, scratching, rolling and stamping that make the surface of his unstretched canvas full of painterly interest.

As well as the paintings of mowing and pounding in fence posts there is one example of Trusttum's Pictures at an Exhibition series, where Mussorgsky's music inspires an image of women chattering in the Tuileries Gardens.

This is composed of the words they might speak and is a lively, rhythmic image of gossip.

Trusttum has that great gift of making paintings that are always recognisably his but always fresh, surprising and new.

Further up Parnell Rd, at Artis Gallery until November 2, Matthew Browne is showing his best paintings yet.

They tell truths about colour. For some years he has experimented with apparently simple compositions of overlapping washes of colour. These paintings were mostly watercolours but now he is painting large oils on linen canvas.

They have the simplicity and apparent spontaneity of his early work but add a sense of monumentality. There is a good deal of thought behind the spontaneity.

In the gallery's foyer is Mirror 2, which has a monumental column of black crossed by a transparent sweep of green. The plain vertical and horizontal have the strength of simplicity and the green is very delicate. It shades from a sharp horizon through a veil of transparency into a firm density.

It looks as if it has been achieved by one immense brush-stroke, and this is part of its power. It takes knowledge and skill and detailed work to achieve this gestural force.

The sense of process, the emphasis that this is paint on a surface, is reinforced by small runs on many of the paintings, conveying the the method and acting as grace notes.

The combinations of colour range from the light and airy Sequester11 to the solemn blue and red of Sum 2.

This show is a convincing demonstration of how the most simple yet truthful of forms can convey an extraordinarily dynamic range of feelings.

Another element open to painters is the possibility of conveying a poetic, visionary truth. By combining light, the tumult of the sea and unusual techniques, Gary Currin makes a fascinating exhibition, at the McPherson Gallery in Vulcan Lane until October 25.

His paintings show no particular place or narrative yet convey a sense of location in a special world and of travelling in unknown seas. The poetic quality of two big paintings that dominate the exhibition recall Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: "We were the first that ever burst/ Into that silent sea".

One of them, Memoir, has golden veils of mist over a labouring sea. The other, Between Two Landings, is full of the wash of waves and energised by a dark area in the foreground which may be the point of departure.

The other works are done on panels from doors so the painting moves over the frame and a moulding into the space of the panel. Incorporating the frame in the painting can be irritating but here it works well, making the inner panel like a casement looking out on unknown seas.

Currin has been painting a long time but has never painted better.

Another twist to the possibilities of painting is the sharp, grotesque human interest of the paintings of Peter Wichman, at Oedipus Rex Gallery (32 Lorne St) until October 24.

His paintings are full of weird people, Goya-esque and strange as they pray futilely to a Madonna in the sky, or when their banquet tilts into an abyss.

Strange, bizarre and satiric, these paintings need deft handling to make them effective, and again, in their own way, they demonstrate small truths about human nature.