The galleries: Mutability and the passing of time

By T.J.McNAMARA

"It's a lovely painting - it looks like a photograph," says one. "It's a lovely photograph - it looks like a painting," says another. Commonplace stuff, but really judgment depends on the definition of lovely rather than the concept of painting or photography. Ultimately, it is the image that matters.

Brad Lochore, a New Zealand painter long resident in London, has made a fine career out of paintings in pale tones that look like photographs of shadows. His Recent Painting at the Gow Langsford Gallery (until March 6) has rightly received much attention, and paintings such as the beautifully rim-lit hedge with its pale blue/green can be read as particular as a plant or as general as the pale fires of purgatory. Certainly it is a handsome work.

At the Jensen Gallery in Upper Queen St (until April 3), American artist James Casebere has an equally impressive exhibition, of photographs that are as evocative and atmospheric as the most subtle painting. Some of them use window frames and their shadows in ways that make them similar to the work of Lochore.

The photographs are moody, atmospheric architectural views that recall the work of the 17th-century etcher Piranesi. Like Piranesi, Casebere made his reputation by composing images of mysterious prisons. Casebere used the concept of ideal circular structures so beloved of 19th century prison reformers.

He made these structures of cardboard and photographed them so they looked as big as the Colosseum. He always had one window brightly lit to suggest a means of escape.

There are no prisons in the present exhibition, Mutable, but the bright windows remain allied to shadowy portals that suggest more than they state. Change, mutability and the passing of time have been introduced by the idea of water flooding into the buildings. The interiors in most of these large and beautifully presented photographs have their floors flooded with water. They are sinking and changing and often there is an Italian connection that evokes Venice.

Siena (Vertical) is a vaulted space and the title may refer to colour. It and the remarkable perspective of Four Flooded Arches from the Left suggest the vaultings of ancient buildings threatened by the processes of time.

Every image stimulates the imagination - not only by offering glimpses of light and darkness but also by staircases which lead out of the flood but to nowhere in particular, similar to the great staircases that give strong compositional tension to Piranesi's Prisons.

A remarkable work, Green Staircase, has stairs, double doors and a Venetian fanlight and the equally splendid Yellow Hallway gains its atmosphere from an Italianate tiled floor in a flooded place filled with watery light.

It is not all Italian. Spanish Bath makes evocative use of a Moorish arch in a pillared niche and a trademark bright, recessed window.

Although there is an absence of human figures since these architectural photographs are taken from small table-top models, the exhibition's value is architecture as psychology; each image reflects a human mood.

It might be asked how these photographs are better than a picture of a set design for the theatre or the movies. The answers lie in the precise, formal strength of the work, even when it is no more than a window in a bare room and in the still, monumental quality of the lighting.

But where is the political significance? Where is the argument? Where is the polemic?

You find all that around the corner and along the street at the Ivan Anthony Gallery in Karangahape Rd where Matt Hunt has a show called Paradise and Policy which runs until February 28.

Here, a couple of dozen tiny paintings, some no more than 5cm square, round up and pillory the usual suspects for the ills of the world: Americans, the military, the corporations, men in suits and religion, especially Christianity.

Figures symbolising these are set on a darkling plain with mountains in the background or in an inter-galactic space where angels hover. And it is all nonsense.

Take for instance a piece called The Intergalactic Realm of the Paradise Dimension, which contains the most intriguing detail. In the foreground is a female angel. In the background is a tiny Lamb of God, a city floating in a capsule and a soul flying in the air. All the paintings are adorned with wordy texts. This one has a rubric that says, "Everyone can be creative without burdens".

This show is full of stereotypical creations: angels and Daleks, bulls and demons, all done without the burden of real thought about the implications of what is said.