Painting shows range from careful to riotous

The shows of pure painting this week range from careful to riotous. They all have a landscape reference which similarly ranges from specific through visionary to spontaneous creation.

The specific landscapes are by Don Binney at Artis Gallery in Parnell until May 8. This is familiar territory. There are compositions with birds whose wings intersect with the frame and familiar landscapes around Bethell's Beach with the steep hills defined by a black line. The sea is textured, the sky plain, the stylisation tight and the birds loom large.

Far more delicate is a series of pencil drawings where there are no birds. Here, the texture comes from the splendid paper used by Binney. The shifts of tone are subtle and make airy images of Great Barrier seen from a variety of Auckland viewpoints. A special feature is the way clouds over the island are exactly observed and rendered using the white of the paper.

The landscapes by Garry Currin at the Milford Galleries until April 23 also feature the sea but in flooding movement. The exhibition is called Old Language and the titles of individual paintings have biblical and mythological references.

Currin has spent many years on apocalyptic paintings filled with sea, sky, veils of mists and the light of the setting or rising sun. This exhibition is so full of confidence and authority that it makes his earlier work, however complex, seem tentative. A curious mannerism is to leave little torn patches of white to emphasise that these are created visions, not representations of reality.

Some of the paintings are a vision of waves and spume washing into the foreground with rocks and headlands in the distance. The patterns on the waters are skilfully done and give an exceptional sense of movement but the real drama of these works lies in the sky and clouds.

At the end of Wagner's great opera, The Twilight of the Gods, the river Rhine floods into the Hall of the Gibichungs to wash away an old order. Just such a theatrical feeling is created in the painting that gives its title to the exhibition where the movement of water over rocks and dimly perceived ruins is surrounded by an irregular black border like the proscenium arch of a huge theatre. The effect is powerful.

Equally strong is After Jonah where, in the midst of the maelstrom, the rocks are mixed with enigmatic, human-made structures. After Noah is a similar work but a grand rising sun conveys the sense of a new beginning.

In Genesis, veils of mist rise from the tumult of the waters. This painting has a little more colour than the shades of brown that prevail elsewhere. Currin manipulates his light and dark, but not intensifying the atmosphere by more varied use of colour reads like a failure of nerve. Yet among his turgid shades such works as After Icarus, referring to the marvellous boy who fell from the sky, are undeniably moving.

Interestingly, the few small paintings cannot carry the style and the same is true of a riotous exhibition by Cristina Popovici at the Studio of Contemporary Art in Newmarket until April 22.

As with Currin, these paintings work best when they are large but, unlike his work, the colour is exceptionally vibrant, notably in the use of vivid red. The key to the work is rhythm. The technique is immensely varied. Paint is scattered on the work. It is dripped in big gouts; it is thick; it is thin; it is scraped; it is splashed. There are even big areas of previously painted material collaged on to the surface to give abrupt, sharp-edged changes of feeling.

Yet everything is in the grip of compelling rhythms and, as always with Popovici's work, reading the painting involves the viewer in every decision. We feel the mind processes at work - "Here we need some red - there a dash of blue - let's make this colour swoop - stretch that colour out." The sense that the painter is talking to herself as she applies each extravagant form is reflected in the startlingly vigorous red and gold of Letter to Myself.

Other outstanding works are Dancing with Flames and In the Garden of Poems, a painting where darkness shades toward light tensioned by a series of arcing blacks and a hint of a skull to tighten up the feeling. The exhibition is called Height and the feeling is that a good deal of it was painted with the canvas on the floor a la Jackson Pollock. This emphasises that the paintings are a typography, a created landscape which can be excitingly explored by the eye.

Concern to make the surface interesting, no matter what the subject, is apparent in On the Surface by Angus Collis at the McPherson Gallery until April 23. This artist depicts swimming pools and urban landscapes dotted with people. The surface of these landscapes is cracked, marked, even attacked, so they appear like some sign or poster that has been weathered and felt the effects of time.

The effect in Monterey Key is to make a mosaic where light falls on sea and pool but the people crumble into anonymity.

The effect is oddly touching. There are not many artists who can get good painterly mileage from a water slide.