Spider-Man takes giant leaps for human imagery

The superhero confronts evidence of mortality. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

Spider-Man leaping from place to place as a hero of comics and films has become a curious icon for our times. In an audacious piece of gallery display, a statue of him by Stephen Birch stands in tense and colourful splendour facing the wall right in the middle of the Michael Lett Gallery. He will be there until May 21.

Spider-Man stands tall, poised, even elegant in his spiderweb suit. The bright blue tights around his backside are a powder-blue colour rather more spectacular than the original. He is light on his feet but his hands are large. Here is our modern David transposed from Florence to Karangahape Rd.

He is confronted by evidence of mortality. He is eye-to-eye with an elderly, bearded, balding head which projects from the wall on the end of a hairy limb.

The effect is of fixed melancholy. The contrast between the two faces goes far beyond Pop Art to make a piece both striking and witty.

A Spider-Man leap takes you from one end of K Rd to the other for the Disrupt Gallery where there is, until May 12, an exhibition of graffiti art done in spray enamel by Oliver Bogle.

Spider-Man features again. The most lively, if not the most spectacular, painting in the show is Intercity Webslinger where Spider-Man, swinging from a rope, can in hand, is doing large graffiti lettering on a block wall.

The most spectacular work is done on 44 paper shopping bags. Like all the other works, it is lettering done in a frenzy of skilled improvisation with the letters spiky, aggressive and jagged. The dazzling lettering is as aggressive as the style.

There are one or two very clever design variations - such as Pot Pouring Out Paint - with its stylish fall of red and a potent image of an apartment building painted on steel - but mostly Bogle remains true to his background in street-based graffiti playing rhythmic variations of the lettering on a plain colour field. The variations are very inventive but they are driven by design, not by emotion.

Another leap takes us across town and back a generation in design with a retrospective exhibition of the work of Ted Dutch at the smart new Artigiano Gallery in Parnell Rd.

Some of the best work does what the graffiti artist does - takes a subject, and gives it a rhythmic expression to make an image in the centre of a field of paper or canvas. Such a work as Shipyard , a screenprint from 1962, is held together by the rhythm of its black lines, although the rhythms are more benign and less aggressive than the graffiti. The same holds for the expressive patterns of Jazz Drummer.

Black is important for Dutch and there is a notable use of it in a vigorous canvas called Sentinel with its tall, proud figure. The black is surprising in a way because the predominant characteristic of the work is that very rare thing - visual humour where the wit is in the line and not in the ironic treatment of a subject. Little bits and pieces of electronic circuits drawn into the designs add to the special flavour of the work.

The wit is most to the fore in the artist's little porcelain figures, notably in Signaler. The variety of mediums caught in the spell of Dutch's lively and unusual design make this a very attractive retrospective covering 50 years of a life working in art.

With one great bound we are back in K Rd at the Ivan Anthony Gallery where Roger Mortimer is showing 1999 (the end of the world) until May 14.

This is also a leap back in time because Mortimer is doing his familiar thing of lettering the details, dates and documents of his life in Gothic lettering in paintings painstakingly illuminated like medieval manuscripts. Everything is there, including details of his vasectomy. There is a short video clip as part of the show, recording moments in the life of his family. Details of such things as faces are transferred from the video to the medieval-style paintings. For instance, portraits are tucked away inside the loops of the elaborate initial capital letters that head each text.

The game is played to the full. There are marginal comments and additions to the text and, most appealing of all, curlicules of stylised foliage in the medieval manner. An end piece of a very cheerful devouring dragon amid leafy foliage is a particularly fine specimen.

It is all undeniably clever but it raises the question about the importance of the text. Is it just decoration on the painted surface to make an intriguing image, or are we expected by close examination of the text to become really involved in the minutiae of the artist's life?

The question is complicated by the way the paintings share the exhibition with little grotesque dolls covered by scraps of text which are mostly illegible.

The exhibition breaks no new ground for Mortimer but firmly establishes his singular manner.

One more leap, zooming down Queen St and up to O'Connell St, takes us to the Lane Gallery and to Hong Kong. The exhibition at Lane until May 14 is shared by Josephine Do and Anna Tse. Do's inkjet prints are scenes from life in Hong Kong digitally manipulated to emphasise contrasting details. These works are energised in a very fresh way by circular sweeps of colour which frame the scenes and set the atmosphere of each image.

With the work of Tse we return to words, not as graffiti but as painstaking, spidery accumulations of dots of colour. They suggest how emotions and attitudes emerge from a mass of details.

The images of both artists are energetic and subtle. They share one of those characteristics with Spider-Man.