The galleries: Working in mysterious ways

Michael Taylor's Precious Umbrella.

Paint, fibre glass and steel are listed as the media for Rohan Wealleans' work Tingler that won the paramount award in last week's 15th annual Wallace Art Awards.

The operative word is paint. The rest is scaffolding. The remarkable thing about Tingler - a truncated torso or a landscape, or a rock, or a world, or whatever else - is that it is covered with layer upon layer of paint.

These layers have been excavated so the underpainting can be glimpsed like geological strata. It is a world in itself made up of layers of culture and history with only a few places that are deep mysterious holes yet to be explored.

The conditions of the award tend towards producing paintings. Apart from photographs and some romping things, like Rachel Easting's Love and Desire with an allegorical lion ravishing a kitschy allegorical unicorn, almost all the entries were paintings, from which two splendid exhibitions have been mined. At the Aotea Centre there is a group of works that will travel around the country. Crowded into the Wallace Trust Gallery in 310 Queen St is an equally fine exhibition of finalists not selected to tour.

The subjects and styles are hugely varied and audacious. See them before October 18.

There is a positive flood of painting riches this week. Two strong exhibitions owe a lot to the great tradition of Renaissance painting.

The first is by Michael Taylor at the McPherson Gallery until October 7, Paintings for the Year of the Dog. These strongly atmospheric paintings are constructed in immaculate perspective according to the best examples of Piero della Francesca and the paint is laid on in thick scumbles in the manner of the great Venetians, although locations such as Mt Eden and Mt Albert are clearly recognisable.

Always there is a dog present and a little symbolic window that suggests the state of mind of the people who haunt these suburban streets. In one work lonely figures have a precious umbrella which is the shelter of their familiar surroundings. .

In her work, Donna Demente at SOCA Gallery until October 12, takes only faces from the Renaissance. These faces she squeezes, squashes and stylises between heavy frames to make a compelling presence conveyed by a direct stare.

Eyes are everything in this show. In an untitled work that is typically in a huge Baroque frame, the arch of the frame pushes in at the level of the eyes of the face and reinforces the image of a withdrawn presence smiling at its own secrets. The paint surface is varied by a spatter technique which could easily suggest freckles but actually suggests the distant past.

This technique is used in an outstanding painting called Lunik. It is perfectly circular and more than a metre in diameter. This face is a vast moon and its effectiveness is enhanced by a naturalistic feature of the corner of the eyes that is lacking elsewhere. The image is exactly matched to the frame and the frames are crucially important whether they are elaborately gilded or a collage of rippling cotton canvas.

A viewer needs a stout heart to make the audacious leap in space and time and style from these faces to the huge accumulation of painterly crosses that are the basis for a major exhibition of work by the late Allen Maddox at the combined Gow Langsford and John Leech Galleries until October 21.

Maddox was fixed on one concept: that with a cross slashed on to the canvas he could express a whole world of emotions ranging from angry aggression to delight in placing colours together. At its best the work of this passionate, angry, driven painter is a powerful expression of the force of pure painting.

After this, the concept of painting as frozen music is calm and even placid. Dorothy Helyer's exhibition at the Edmiston Duke Gallery is called Fantasy & Fugue and is based on the music of J.S. Bach. Some parts of the painting are dotted with little studs which are a visual representation of the notes of the music. It also incorporates areas of black that act as a bass continuo but it is at its best when areas of green suggest solemn, rich, organ tones.