Multiple-choice dilemmas

By T.J. McNAMARA

Decisions, decisions: the artist, like the teacher, lives in a world of decisions. For the artist there is that terrifying decision about where to make the first mark on the bare surface. One of the considerable merits of the exhibition of paintings by the late Allen Maddox at the Gow Langsford Gallery (until September 7) is that we can participate in all the decisions he made as he painted.

In his action paintings you can see him deciding which colour to cross against another, whether to leave some part of his grid empty, whether to make a bold, aggressive statement, as he usually did, or, as sometimes in this show, to make a quavering, uncertain statement.

It is an uneven exhibition yet the decision has been made. Maddox, who concentrated on one motif all his painting career, has his place in the pantheon of New Zealand artists.

Placed even higher on our artistic Olympus is Ralph Hotere whose position is beyond question. The decision has been made and posterity will endorse it. Ferner Galleries, in its splendid new space which was Portfolio Gallery, has devoted most of its opening exhibition to Hotere's works on paper. It will run until August 31.

There is one painting from Hotere's wonderful Melody series. It is fascinating to note that the word "melody" which comes singing out of the dark is painted in the colours of the spectrum. Hotere has allowed physics to make the decision about colour. In most of the works colour is not so much an issue as the movement from light to dark, notably in the Requiem works, some of which use rain like a blessing.

A reviewer must make decisions too. This week is some sort of a record; there are 22 or more shows in Auckland that deserve mention. One of these is Orokohanga-Genesis at the John Leech Gallery until September 7.

It is the latest work by John Walsh, an artist who has leapt into prominence because of his highly individual use of the myths we were all brought up with. He endeavours to reconcile the creation stories in Genesis with the Maori genesis stories.

His paintings are distinctively Maori in flavour because he uses the motifs of Maori carving. His mythical figures such as Tane are clearly differentiated from humankind by their generalised bodies and their three fingers and toes on hand and foot.

The underlying themes are important but they are not the measure of the paintings. The way they illustrate the myths is visually striking both in image and technique.

They form a sequence and the first shows a canoe like a fish being launched into darkness and is concerned with the coming of death into the world. The other paintings recapitulate this fact of human existence but they also deal with the creation of human beings and beginnings of speech and oratory.

Rangi, Papa and their children are seen as a lidded box that might be a bone chest. Tane creates a woman figure and introduces her to his brothers.

All these things are set in a mythical world still in the process of formation. In Tane Introduces Hine Titama to his Brothers the great, three-toed figure holds the child aloft alongside a river that has just been cut and a landscape bare of vegetation.

Walsh has a highly individual technique by which he brushes, scrapes and swabs through thin, wet paint on a hard surface to make the spirals of Maori motifs and defines forms by densely worked concentric strokes.

In the astonishing painting Hine Titama Becomes Hine Nui Te Po the technique makes driven clouds and a convincing tumultuous white void.

The figures have grandeur and a curious identification with nature. It is more than just a feeling that there is a spirit in the woods. In Walsh's painting - particularly in the outstanding Tane Introduces Hine-Ahu-One to His Brothers - the primeval spirits cavort in trees, in mineral pools and even on the edge of the horizon.

The first impulse is to think that the colour of the pools is too bright, too modern, too chemical, but ultimately they are convincing as the minerals at the beginning of the world. Less convincing are some backgrounds that are merely filled in.

Myth is an explanation of phenomena before science, and art very properly is a vehicle for myth. Art equally properly seeks the abstract essence of things, and the work of Valerie Nielsen at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery until September 7 endeavours to convey the "elements" of wood, fire, earth, metal, water and wind.

Each painting is made up of nine small panels. The paintings work as a whole but each panel conveys a small shift of mood and has the appropriate tone of the prevailing colour. Naturally, wood is green and fire is red but there is a fascinating difference between the blue of wind where the panels suggest high, driven cloud; the darker blue of water suggests stillness in some panels and flow in others.

This is an appealing show of jewel-like works, full of decisions about the realities of both life and art.