Mystery beyond art labels

By T.J. McNAMARA

Writers on art are expected to give things labels: post-modernist, abstract, realist, lyrical, traditional and so on. Labels help but they do not go to the cutting edge of what makes art strong and able to involve the viewer. Artists go their individual ways about involving the viewer in their effects and thought.

It is easy to label Ross Ritchie's exhibition at the Milford Galleries as post-modern if you define post-modern art as that which quotes from the past to illuminate present experiences and understandings. Ritchie was doing just this long before the label was current.

Post-modernism began in architecture when, tired of geometric simplicity, people added details from historic buildings to enliven plain structures. Post-modernism in painting probably began when Francis Bacon quoted portraits of Renaissance popes and gave them the screaming neurosis of the 20th century. The process alone did not make Bacon's work memorable but the clotted, expressive paint contrasting with simple lines to define space conveyed the artist's passion.

The recent paintings in Ritchie's show echo this process. When he wants tranquillity he quotes from a serenely beautiful painting by Matisse but disturbs and contradicts the serenity by his own urgent lines like chalk on a blackboard - a demonstration that former serenity can be a disturbing memory.

When he wants to show that history offers changing perspectives, he paints Captain Cook one-eyed like Nelson and with the body of a dwarf purloined from Velasquez. A portrait of Bob Fitzsimmons the boxer is placed within geometrical lines as taut as the geometry of a boxing ring but much more like a spotlight. Collaged on to this work is the towel that the painter cleaned his brushes on. A bit like throwing in the towel, although Fitzsimmons never did. But how do you paint a hero in this age of irony?

The ironies extend to Pulp, which shows a family grouped around a still from The Godfather. The ironies of adolescence are shown in the figure of a young woman, half-child, half-siren, borrowed from Balthus. The ironies of the past are shown by a dignified woman borrowed from Gauguin, holding a baby whose face has aged. All this is posed against a backboard and grid which suggest location and teaching.

The fractured nature of these images and their evocation of many references work well because they are painted with such unfaltering authority and dexterity.

Ritchie creates an uneasy world full of contradictions but his success lies in the way his images create what is unmistakably his world but link powerfully with the viewer's own imaginative world.

At the Gow Langsford Gallery Max Gimblett offers purely visual delight. He charges the splendour of his gold surfaces with the energy that comes from a vigorous gesture charged with paint or from the rhythmic swing of precise geometry.

There is, as always with this painter, a mystery about his surfaces. The gold surfaces are simple enough and by reflection make the viewer part of the painting. The surfaces achieved with polymer and epoxy resin are translucent and the movement within them mysterious and magical.

At this mature stage of his career he is prepared to work on a large scale and several of his works are majestic in size, notably Ocean Dyad. It is two moody panels, cloudy, rich and with a surface as transparent as water. Over these twin panels surges a great black wave of energy.

All this can be labelled abstract art but its power comes from its status as metaphor because it does link with forms in our experience. This becomes explicit in another dyad titled Mountains and Text where the polymer area has dim, tall peaks and shadowy caves while the contrasting panel has black, interleaved forms.

Landscape is not hinted at but explicit in the work of George Baloghy at Artis Gallery in Parnell. His paintings are bright, clear, precise, detailed depictions of Hahei Beach, where he has had a bach for 26 years. They are almost blindingly precise depictions of Coromandel, beach tractors and all. But there is a spin - you cannot exactly label them realist.

They are so bright and brash as to be almost an ironic comment. The artist is playing lots of little games, not the least of which is Spot the Kiwi and Rabbit.

Another game is to put the artist in the picture but not at the point from which the picture is painted. Another is to paint Cook's Endeavour sailing past. Baloghy's craftsmanship copes splendidly with the detail of the ship, which sits on the water as few ships in painting do.

This device makes the paintings like illustrations in a popularising history book. An intense and witty effect is gained when he shows a group of acrobats that have strayed, lost, from Europe and a Picasso painting on the beach and more so when a couple of giant Picasso Mediterranean women cavort on the sand. This is not realism but a witty and memorable surrealism.

Also using the landscape of the North is a lovely exhibition by Stanley Palmer at the Anna Bibby Gallery. He paints the bays and inlets where the only sign of human occupation is a road, a post or a fence. The tones of the folding hills and the line of the sea are brought into unity by a poetic atmosphere that conveys with an honest, sincere and penetrating eye the essence of the land and floods it with light and shadow and poetry: a painter's mystery beyond all labels.