KEY POINTS:
A devil in the form of a yeti adds myth and menace to Seraphine Pick's painting.
Dark art looms importantly. It deals with the paradox of human existence that suffering is stronger than good. Did He smile His work to see? Did He who made the lamb make thee? Tiger ...
For Blake, good is as weak as a lamb, and evil as powerful as a tiger.
Suffering and sacrifice were the principal subjects when art centred on the Crucifixion, but since Goya many artists have investigated secular suffering and made it clear that art can still be more than just pretty. An artist is a seeker after truth, and unhappy truths can be art.
Two of the exhibitions this week are dark although there is a superficial brightness to the work of Seraphine Pick at the Michael Lett Gallery in Karangahape Rd until December 16.
The brightness comes from the way there are so many attractive young women in Pick's work. In a key painting, a woman skier dressed to the nines has encountered a devil on the snowfields. It has the shape of a hairy yeti that looms over her, mythical, menacing and masculine.
The yeti appears again in a big complex painting called Hideout, only this time it wears riding-boots. This painting has a lot of complex interaction where birds assembled in a tree have faces of women and others flaunt their underwear.
Even when they kneel in submission they have long nails that grow into claws. The whole is dominated by a priestess, in a modern dress, who points to a wounded bird. There is a great deal happening in this ambitious work but the haunting nature of Pick's images is most effective when at its simplest. A small work which is no more than a young woman with a bird thrusting its head into her mouth is particularly powerful. The bird itself is dead - look at its feet - and the feeling is that it is some spirit of the woman's imagination that took flight and returned and died.
Even more potent is Imaginary Friend, where a young girl has conjured up a dog as companion and it has become a painful monster that blurs her sensibility indicated by the out-of-focus face. A flower with a red centre blossoms between her legs.
Knowing dogs are a feature of this strange exhibition. A pitiless, bitter woman cradles an intent dog under a lurid moon while underneath a man lies prostrate in a forest, drinking.
As usual, the viewer is swept away by the acid power of the artist's vision and invention and this makes oddities of drawing - the lack of knees in the legs of figures, the illogicality of a fence that stands in a different space from the figure in front, and the lurid red which distracts from all sort of ambiguities of form in Sleepwalk.
Despite these oddities of technique we recognise true things about the nature of human neuroses in these compelling visions.
Richard Lewer makes no bones about his interest in human suffering. He spent months listening to the police radio in Wanganui and culling images of conflict from it. His exhibition at Orexart until December 8 is a show of drawings completed during his residency at St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne, where the intercom system was a similar stimulus.
These are drawings in pencil as large as big paintings. The graphite gives him a range of effects, from intense black to fine lines. The images of suffering, such as I Cut my Arms for You and Visiting Hours are Now Over, have Lewer's usual vocabulary of claustrophobic interiors signalled by sharp angles, drawn blinds and distorted perspectives.
A particular feature is where dark waves loop up, crest, then fall back in a point which is the focus of pain.
These paintings have an implied narrative but the story is unclear because the suffering is not particular but universal.
The images of the intense physical and mental distress of patients are matched in this show with some monumental portraits of the mother superiors who ran the hospital when it was founded more than 100 years ago. Their heavy habits and prominent crosses make for massive images of benevolent but stern dedication to nursing. The great dark shape of Mother Berchmans Daly is matched by the ghostly white presence and bony hand of Mother Gonzaga Considine.
These images, over-lifesize and powerfully drawn, are far from comfortable but they have an extraordinary presence. They are among the best things Lewer has done, focusing all his talent, but their ultimate destination - like all dark art - is unclear.
Lewer's work is dark in colour as well as mood. Stylistically it contrasts with the work of Pick, but both exhibitions take art seriously as a social force. We are lucky to have two artists who approach their work with such depth of thought and purpose.
The way darker themes can give depth is also shown in two smaller exhibitions which are charming on the surface and gain strength by hinting at sombre depths.
In the small gallery in Orexart Angela Singer is having her third exhibition of recycled taxidermy and makes unsettling ornaments that match rats with butterflies.
In the small back room at the Lane Gallery until November 28, Liam Davidson engraves drawings of women into tiles and reveals quirks of bony structure and personality in his attractive subjects.
