Outbreak backs figurative art argument

By T.J. McNAMARA

The word "synchronicity" refers to when events seem linked. It could describe a sudden outbreak of figurative-art exhibitions in downtown Auckland.

It provides plenty of material for those who think that abstract art has had its day and that the figure is back in fashion.

What is instructive, entertaining and, at times, moving is the wide variety of use made of the figure by the artists.

At the McPherson Gallery is the show that has the greatest shock factor. Zarahn Southon is a young artist with a considerable command of figure drawing and skilled in the use of paint to convey the sense of bone and muscle under the skin. The shock factor comes from the way his big, nude figures are laid out with limp, blue-veined penises on display. These are not idealised people. The most telling image is of a fat man, with his legs spread wide, sprawled on rocks by the sea.

Almost as striking an image is Tense and Release where a painfully bony man is shown with enormous stiffness around his shoulders and chest and with legs limp and relaxed as if he had just died. There are hints of Holbein's Dead Christ about the figure though the subject is not specific and the setting reads as modern. The other precedent evoked by these paintings is the work of Lucien Freud, the English painter who specialises in mercilessly revealing character by displaying grotesque bodies.

Like Freud, Southon keeps to a subdued palette. Also, like Freud, he is capable of small, startling portraits that are character studies. His Girl with Open Mouth is a fine piece of work and Man with False Teeth is terrifying.

This is a painter pushing sensation, sometimes faltering as in E-scape where the lower part of the torso of a tall, naked man by the seashore slips unresolved out of the bottom of the painting.

The gallery is also host to an exhibition of head studies by John Eaden. These show painterly ways of making the head look monumental. Mostly he does it by simplification and a wide horizon in the background. It works impressively with heads in full-face and does not come off at all when the heads are in profile.

At the Chiaroscuro Gallery, the figure is used to show the tension of interaction between people. Andre Sampson creates figures with Tudor clothing, caps and dresses that make them look both repressed and depressed. Her whole exhibition is about dominance.

Women are oppressed by women. Girls are made to stand in the corner. Youthful women with a partner are watched with avid envy by other women.

When the Puritan element is overstressed by the costume - ruffs, steeple hats and all - the paintings become illustrative, specific, story-telling. When the tension is a matter of pose and sidelong glance, the obliqueness leaves room for the viewer's imagination and the dramatic effect is more intense.

Many of the paintings are mounted as thick blocks. This leaves room for the title on the side but in some measure foils the constructed space and setting in which the figures act.

This is not so in the single most ambitious painting which has a modern setting where even supper is a game. In Parlour Games for High Rollers men and women, the women for the most part in off-the-shoulder dresses, are rhythmically disposed in a dance across the picture. Some are complete personalities, some are incomplete. Glances between them are the image of domination. The tension between people is similar to that in the work of the supreme modern painter of sexual tension, Paula Rego.

The exhibition is accompanied by a smaller show by Catherine Manchester where the figures are not specific but sublimated into flame-like spirits. The style is a bit thin to convey the emotional charge intended, except in Figure Sequence II where the spirits take flight and in the unexpectedly lovely dream painting Non Locality Linkage.

At the Judith Anderson Gallery is the marvellously accomplished painting of Susan Wilson. These are autobiographical works. Those that are not self-portraits show things important to the painter.