The galleries: Seeing beyond red

By T.J. McNAMARA

Some artists draw their inspiration from within themselves, others draw their material from their community or tribe. If they are successful in giving their material an interesting form, their images will have an appeal beyond their particular sources.

This week, two artists successfully use such contrasting sources. The work of Luise Fong, which has not been seen in Auckland for some years, is highly individual. Her exhibition at Starkwhite in Karangahape Rd until March 6 is a welcome and assured return to the scene.

The show is dominated by the colour red. There is even a red tunnel to walk through to enter the exhibition. This gives a little frisson since it hints at returning to the womb, but it is an irrelevance beside the vivid assemblages and paintings that make up the real show.

These have different functions. One refers to the process of art and the other is the product.

There is something of a contradiction in the assemblages. One of them, Rampage, is little short of stunning. It has as a focal point a glass of deep red wine, as well as a beaded red pattern painted on the wall behind the three-dimensional objects.

It is a piece of many moods. It is wild, with long strings of red beads and high-heeled shoes. It is domestic, with chair legs and tidy drawers and whisks.

It has aspirations: notebooks, a stepladder to get to a higher level and another ladder made of bamboo which hints at the artist's ethnicity.

High on the left of the work is a square of overlapping circles in very deep red. It resembles a tribute of roses and completes a work full of vivid life and thought.

Small dark circles or circular holes that go right through the surface of the work have always been a feature of Fong's painting and they are found in the next assemblage, called Activate.

The black circles are on a painting standing on a saw-horse. The painting, which is orange-red, is leaning against a canvas drip-sheet with all the accidental marks and stains that land on the floor when artists are at work.

There is a red circle where a paint tin lid has been used as a stencil. The whole assemblage speaks of an artist's activity.

The rest of the work is the end point of that activity - completed, four-square, wall-hung paintings.

Four fine paintings extend the circles that are the artist's most common motif, literally and metaphorically. In these paintings the circle of thick paint has been driven or allowed to run into a droplet.

The natural direction of these droplets is downward, but by making them horizontal as well as vertical, Fong introduces elements of movement and tension.

The most spectacular work is, once again, deep red. It is called Big Girl's Butterfly. Here the droplets leap out from the centre in a pattern full of drive and yet delicate.

Even more delicate is Intro - all inter-penetrating horizontals which are pale and sweet but never loose or sloppy.

In Sync, abrasion is added to the painting, dripping, blowing and drying techniques that in mysterious ways produce these paintings. Here loops are added to the droplets, which combine into emblems. The effects of variations within a motif are lyrical and all the works are bold evidence of vigorous yet ordered painterly invention.

John Walsh, who has an exhibition at the John Leech Gallery until March 6, has an unusual style. He uses his art to express the history and lore of the people of Tolaga Bay, where he was born. The whole body of work is called Uawa, which is the name for the region around the bay.

His work draws on myth, which explains natural phenomena, and legend, where heroic figures of the past clash or entwine.

His painting in thin paint on hard board, and defining forms by techniques of wiping and scraping through the paint, has the distancing effect of creating an other-wordly realm but one linked to this.

It also unifies, in a remarkable way, gods, humans and the landscape. This is apparent in Te Takapau o Hineteiwaiwa, where a river landscape is full of foreboding. On the banks we can make out the doomed figures of lovers, haunted to their death by a tohunga's curse.

The style shifts easily from this legend to depiction of the soul's journey in the waka of death along a river of blinding light in Motuhia te Pito.

Not everything is as sombre as this. In the delightful Te Raroa, gods take their ease in the summer light.

Strong Maori feeling and motif, space, light, the spirit that moves in the top of the trees at night, the people of the past and the gods still present are memorably illustrated in these paintings that are special to Aotearoa.