The galleries: Powerful work on a crash course

Sara Hughes' paintings, all called Crash, are precise and decorative yet wildly energetic and powerful.

What sort of words do you use to write about art? Some writers use vocabulary from music. This week there is the case for using expression marks like fortissimo or pianissimo.

The exhibition of painting by Sara Hughes at the Gow Langsford Gallery until June 3 is a brass band playing at full blast. The paintings are big, powerfully decorative, wildly energetic and all called Crash.

Yet the technique is not expressionistic in the manner of Jackson Pollock or any other cowboy artist. The elements of these paintings are the product of up-to-date technology and are extraordinarily precise.

There are two techniques at work. One work, more an installation than a painting, uses narrow vinyl tapes to make rectangles, crescents and ovals.

Most of the shapes have concentric stripes. The crescents have striped curves. Only the ovals are plain colour, generally purple, and they play the trick of having the same shape in diminishing size to suggest forces thrusting into the centre of the painting or bounding out of it. The colours are bright, clear and unmixed.

This piece, made with the tape attached directly to the wall, launches itself right across the space until it slams into the corner. The impact of hitting the corner breaks everything out into overlapping elements, all moving energetically outward.

The second technique is to use masking tape to help paint extraordinarily intricate forms in acrylic on linen canvas. These have the same potent rhythmic repetitions within each form as the wall installation.

There are only slight differences between these paintings. Crash No 1 is spectacularly large. Crash No 5 has more folding elements that move forward and backward in space.

Crash No 4 is less directional, the lines of oval purple spots go in and out three different ways, and Crash No 2 uses the spaceship element of the striped crescents looping about to give a generalised sense of energy.

Undeniably, there is the feeling that they are all part of the same painting cut off to length, but there has been a clear line in development in Sara Hughes' skills as an artist. Her early work used masses of circular stickers. This work has become much more technically sophisticated and has that element of mystery in its making.

Surely as this artist develops beyond these spectacular decorations she will learn to orchestrate individual paintings for a variety of effect.

That visual music can be quietly pianissimo and yet very beguiling is evident in Sarah Guppy's charming exhibition called Courting Colour, which runs at FhE/G2 Gallery until June 5.

The special technique used by Guppy is to paint with French enamel on the back of panes of glass, so that no matter how many different ways the paint is worked the whole presents a smooth image to the viewer. There is no brass band here, perhaps someone playing Debussy piano pieces.

The titles suggest the nature of these delicate little etudes. Magic Mosaic has areas worked with little dots, although one dark area moves like a bass continuo. Lilac Curtain has a hint of landscape beyond delicately hanging forms and Listening to Tui has a series of rhythmic circles that make a lyric fall behind the glass.

Watermelon is quite delightful with its forms made up of lively little touches and a palette of colour that hints at French decorative painters, Matisse or Bonnard.

The European feeling is contradicted by two slightly larger paintings that fall into horizontal bands of colour, like so much of New Zealand painting. Without indicating any particular place and staying as abstract as music, they suggest wide sky, sea, sand, river and lagoon.

Nevertheless, there are situations where music hardly applies - rather the vocabulary of science comes to the fore. In Elizabeth Thomson's exhibition of wall sculpture at the Anna Bibby Gallery until June 3, geomorphology and biology are relevant.

Each of these wall sculptures has a stylised landscape of hill and dale as regular as buttoned upholstery. In a number of the works the contours are emphasised by patterns stamped through an outer skin to reveal an underlying surface.

Even more remarkable are the works where the hollows make a nesting place for exquisite details made in glass. Particularly fine are the three parts of Another Green World. The surface is beaded glass and each hollow is home to a form with a stalk, a globe and fine glass spines tipped with colour. This form is botanic and an exquisitely delicate growth.

Nearby is a work called Interference VIII, which is larger and where, from the centre of each of the regular declivities, a glass pistil rises topped with a multibulbous orange stigma.

It is at once natural and wonderfully transformed into abstract art.

There are times when the novel and poetry provide the vocabulary. In the work of Helen Lees in her exhibition Off Balance, at the Edmiston Duke Gallery until May 19, many of her paintings of women suggest a narrative and imply a story, while others have little bits of surrealistic imagery that might suggest the poetry of a dream.

The paintings that imply a narrative are impressive. Lipstick spread round a battered mouth, tired eyes, an unbuttoned glove and a heavy oppressive necklace give us enough material to create a story in our imagination.

Strongly painted and painfully thoughtful, these are the paintings of an artist of present achievement and even more potential.