Painting goes back to its pure roots

The big art news in Britain is that Charles Saatchi - the most prominent collector and taste-maker in contemporary British art - has given over his gallery to a show called The Triumph of Painting. It is the first of three shows this year which will be devoted entirely to painting on a flat surface. His Britart masterpieces have either been sold (Damien Hirst's shark went to New York for US$7 million) or put into storage.

Do the exhibitions here suggest pure painting is big again? Two of the best things on show in Auckland are conceptual art and video, but painting certainly rears its head.

There is a connection with Saatchi. Former Christchurch artist Francis Upritchard has had works bought for the Saatchi Collection and has an exhibition at Artspace until March 5.

The show is a remarkable piece of curatorship. The huge main gallery has only one work, flat on the floor - a large, hairy beast that is half monkey, half spider, though it has only four legs waving in the air. It is a curiosity presented as sculpture.

Other work is pushed so far down to the end of the adjacent long gallery it could almost be overlooked. Here, the fashionable word "vitrine" comes into play. It means putting work in a glass case so it becomes like a museum specimen, isolated and special. Damien Hirst's exhibition in Naples is almost entirely made up of vitrines.

This is exactly suited to Upritchard's exhibition Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed and concerns itself with the way enigmatic odd bits and pieces may be all that remains.

One vitrine contains her now celebrated and memorable imitation shrunken heads.

More vitrines are in the third gallery, as well as her latest development - draped melancholy statuettes of ascetics. The whole show is sad but not sour and certainly reinforces the memento mori associations of the title.

In the show Coming Out at the Vavasour/Godkin Gallery until February 26, video art is alongside painting. First is a typical scattered installation - severed feet and dynamite among upright members of society. It is by Emma Smith and called Luxury Liner and is, one supposes, a visual equivalent of The Death of Klinghoffer, the contemporary opera set on a ship which will be part of AK05. The three-dimensional elements include Hamish Palmer's peep-hole bird boxes which contain photographs of kumara posing as birds. They were funny when he first did them. They are now running a bit thin.

Far more potent is the work of Gregory Bennett, who shows the short art video genre still has life in it. His painstakingly photographed mannequins evoke sympathy as they take a step in the dark and tumble into the void, transform into trees, get lost in a human jungle or show fear and puzzlement at a hospital situation, where everything, even a pillow, can become strange.

The strength of his created images is shown by the way they transfer to still photography to make images of a round dance of life or, most notably, an immensely complex print called Fall

1 that challenges traditional images of the Last Judgment.

Some of the energy Saatchi taps into is certainly there in the bright, vivid work of Chantelle Smith, sweet and as full of juice as the berries which inspire its colour in Cranberry, and the upward-rippling, lively Blackcurrant.

The special colour relationships that only painting can ally to tactile gestures that build up a structure are part of the appeal of the colourful work.

That painting is certainly not dead, though perhaps short of triumphant as in the title of the Saatchi show, is emphasised by a newcomer and a veteran painter.

At the Lane Gallery is an exhibition by two artists who have, as yet, achieved little prominence. Lurlene Christiansen works in ceramic and has statuettes based on a legendary eel. Lorene Taurerewa is a painter to be reckoned with.

Her tall, strange, mythical figures loom out of a bright background. At their best they are full, stern and have the brooding power of myth. Set in a box-like coffin they are more consciously symbols of mortality and more conventional, but the solitary figures have considerable force.

The long-established painter Sylvia Siddell is at Artis Gallery until March 6. She manipulates paint to give a wriggling life to everyday objects. Her work has consistently got bigger and more confident. This year, full-sized couches and garden seats get the treatment in this lively show.

It is at its most quirky and effective when details give a surreal spin to the image. Notable is Feral Couch, where vegetation threatens the human world and the couch cushions have teeth.

Strangest is a draped Library Chair, which takes on a ghostly Miss Haversham quality. The white drapery gives it more force of suggestion than the various femmes fatale of Historic Couch, delightful though that work is.

In an interview, Charles Saatchi hoped his example would be contagious. Auckland certainly features enough good painting to make his present preoccupation catching.