TJ McNamara: Golden touch brings wealth of meaning

Gold leaf has always had a big part to play in painting. In icons and early Italian painting the background of the picture was not landscape or an interior but worked gold leaf. The sacramental qualities and preciousness of gold leaf have always been a part of Tony Lane's painting practice. He often uses gold leaf lavishly on frames and Lane has also extended its use to provide rich areas of meaning within the painting.

His show, Miraculous Objects, at the Jensen Gallery in Upper Queen St until October 12, coincides with the launch of a book on his work, and consists of nearly a dozen paintings with this sacramental quality.

The work references many things. It features the gold and silver leaf backgrounds of pre-Renaissance art, the stylised hills in the manner of later art, as well as altar tables, communion wafers and Christ's wounds.

Lane's style is almost unique in New Zealand in the way it includes the frame as part of the painting, and in the way elements are raised from the surface as relief, again in the manner of early Italian painting.

The relief elements are often a series of objects like necklaces but such is his particular magic he transforms them from strings of beads into precious adornments which are also like systems of stars: references to strong spiritual values.

Everywhere, the ordinary is transformed. In Three Stigmata there are ranges of hills where each hill is outlined by a halo at once earthy and yet rich in green/blue colour and suggestion.

The colours of these halos are transferred to three rectangles bordered by relief elements, each containing a daub of coloured clay from the hills like paint on an artist's palette. These primitive palettes show the transformation of commonplace material into art is spiritual as well as practical. A similar process occurs in Window where, against a ropy cross, four areas of gold leaf shine like beacons. The precious quality of art as quasi-religious ritual is continued in more recent work such as Two Tables which are, in effect, monumental altars, and in Three Hearts which is equally evocative.

This is art of high seriousness, invention and great visual appeal. The enormous value placed on artists' materials in these works is both their glory and their handicap.

They look splendid but the viewer may not give the same symbolic value to the material and the stylised images that the artist with his high purpose wishes to convey. The work is marvellous but just short of convincingly wonder-working.

Meticulous processes in making art have an appeal all of their own. One of the great merits of the work of Deborah Crowe, at the Vavasour/Godkin Gallery until October 12, is the immaculate nature of their making. Her work divides into two parts: boxes and screens.

The boxes, flawlessly made without a hint of a join, enclose mirror glass. Against the background of glass there are patterned layers of taut, fine nylon line. These tense lines are brilliantly coloured and intersect at right-angles. The total effect is of a brilliant abstract work that changes as the spectator moves.

Photographs of these boxes have been taken, enlarged and printed on mesh screens that reach from floor to ceiling. The screens become a different experience from the boxes. Because they are mesh, they hang like an inexplicably strong mist but they are shot through with dynamic flashes of hot colour.

The show is extraordinarily clever and carried through with such precision, elegance and vividness that it convincingly persuades that in the right hands abstract art still has the potential to surprise.

There are surprises, too, in the work of Scott McFarlane at the Milford Galleries until September 30. Wordsworth found a spirit in the woods, McFarlane finds a presence in the hills. Sometimes it is as obvious as a face or a great languid female form stretched in front of a lake. At other times the presence is not specific but an atmosphere conveyed by dim lighting and the tense barriers of ridges where the trees sit like the scouts of an army in the dead ground beyond.

Though the exhibition focuses on particular aspects of Northland, the artist manages to generalise about the weight of our landscape and its solemnity. There are some comparative failures such as the experimental Northland Palette and the mist of Taiamai X takes the prevailing brown tones and washes them into nothing.

But the exhibition demonstrates once again that a sensitive artist can do much more with the New Zealand landscape than just picture its outward appearance.