The galleries: Photos without the camera

By T.J. McNAMARA

For many people the highest praise of a work of art is to say, "It looks like a photograph". The Anawhata paintings of Antonio Murado at the Gow Langsford Gallery until August 22 certainly look like photographs - big, atmospheric, black and white, arty photos that are the stuff of photographic society exhibitions.

The feeling comes from the way the paintings are studies in subtle grey tones and because some of them are varnished so they have the shiny surface of photos. But they are not photographs. They offer so much more than any photo can. The first thing they offer is size.

The best of them is large (No 3) and has an authority beyond a photograph of the same size. It offers a generalisation where the photo would offer only a record, and the generalisation is tied up with the considered handling of the paint.

When we get close to the work we can see the rich handling of the tumultuous, tossing clouds and the delicate variations that create the sea. The sense of making extends to accident and purpose in runs which indicate rain clouds and the chips and flakes of paint that are incorporated in the work.

In New Zealand one is never far from the sea, and the experience of looking out to sea at the long line of the horizon is a common experience and important in our art.

The sea, the horizon and the sky are part of the work of painters as diverse as Colin McCahon and Don Binney and many abstract paintings fall into horizontal bands.

Yet Murado is a Spanish artist by way of New York. How did he arrive at these New Zealand images? He has been living at Anawhata in the studio of Auckland painter Judy Millar.

The show is true to moods and the seascape of the west coast. The uniformity of the paintings leaves them open to the criticism that they are all the same painting with minor variants.

The major difference between paintings lies in the definition of the horizon, which is sometimes obscure and sometimes strongly defined. They put one in mind of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner where "The sky and the sea and the sea and the sky lay like a load on my weary eye". The moodiness and absence of detail and people bring the work close to abstract art and, like much abstractionism, the surface of the work is impressive.



We are generally used to painters of our coast using the scene for symbolic purposes, so it is refreshing to have such a painterly response that only obliquely touches on the way such a scene reflects the relationship of nature and human affairs.

Another exhibition about the coast is made up of photographs, plus the obligatory video and some window-dressing masquerading as sculpture. A visit to a seal colony underlies the bright self-display of the work by Richard Maloy at the Sue Crockford Gallery until August 16.

In the video the visit is commemorated in the best post-post-modern manner when the artist and friend sit on some rocks and flap their arms like flippers as the sea washes in and out. They wear crude masks that are most unseal-like. Although they "reference" performing seals, they have not mastered the trick of balancing a ball on their noses.

The rest of the work is static. You have photographs of the artist as a rock - a roughly painted rock out of which his head sticks - some rock pools made of polystyrene and corrugated cardboard, and a ceiling-high cardboard cliff roughly cobbled together.

The whole is a kind of mockery - a young man's mockery of anything artistic that someone older than him might like. Solemnity, craftsmanship, thought, endeavour, any emotion deeper than irreverence, have no part in this display. Being different is everything. Window-dressing, smart kitsch and two fingers at any traditional values are the order of the day. Art as playing silly buggers.

It is with a certain amount of relief that one turns to the work of Gary Waldrom at the Judith Anderson Gallery (until August 15) even though the subjects of his painting are grotesque. The faces in his work are those of people you encounter in a little place where you stop for coffee on a long car journey.

There are long horizons in this show also, but this is an arid landscape with derelict buildings. The inhabitants have big heads and strange grins and vivid flashes of green or orange on their caps or clothes.

They have no place to stand and, frequently, simply run out of the bottom of the painting they occupy. The Girl with the Eye Patch in front of a dark, satanic mill, The Peppermint Boys in front of a strange device like a pendulum, The Head Study and The Sandwich Eater are all exactly characterised under the moon, human but fascinatingly alien, odd but appealing and unmistakably Gary Waldrom.

The exhibition is shared with the solemn, sincerely religious, solid, weighty sculptures of Iosefa Leo. They are skilfully carved from marble or limestone, but the single bronze is the work with most charm and presence.