Spontaneous in a calculated way

By T.J. McNAMARA

Sometimes the viewer can join in the time and movement needed to make a painting. The painter becomes a performer, acting out the business of painting and we can follow every movement, decision and gesture.

This style is exemplified in the work of Cristina Popovici whose work is at the Studio of Contemporary Art in Newmarket until Friday. What makes this huge, opulent exhibition by this young artist from Romania so attractive is that it gives a sense of joyous participation reinforced by the colour which is bright and strong.

The impression of vivid spontaneity is assiduously cultivated, the result of a great deal of knowledge of how to create effects with paint.

Because the arm-swing rhythms are so obvious and the colour is applied so directly we can participate in the decisions about what colour and where and how to lay it on.

Confidence is everything in the work of Popovici. It takes artistic courage to work on the exceptionally large scale of her canvases and to combine the mass into an eloquent whole.

Her style of expressive slash and dash is born of Kandinsky out of Jackson Pollock but, unlike these distant mentors, she often holds back from total abstraction and involves a recognisably female figure or mask-like features which dissolve under hectic brush-strokes in the manner of Willem de Kooning.

The best of these semi-figurative works is a complex work called The Banishing of Eve which is a contemporary spin on a traditional subject.

Some paintings transcend any derivative quality and have their own startling audacity, notably the show's title work, Self-portrait in the Fourth Dimension.

It is done on a vast area of PVC, using drips and strokes of orange paint among a multitude of other colours. The painting makes a vivid impression of motion and the passage of time, and the artist has the courage to leave areas unmarked. She does not fussily fill the corners as she does elsewhere in the show, particularly in an overblown work on PVC called The Third Elegy which, by comparison, is simply a try-out of effects.

One of the most impressive works is mostly in black and white with only streaks of colour. The work has a white cleft which leads to space but the eye is saved from falling into this space by a bold loop of white against black. This expressive work is called Free Falling.

Although the artist feels, we are told, that a European audience will give her work a more educated response, the truth is that it is as universal as music and evokes the same richness of response here as elsewhere.

At the other pole from energy is contemplation. Peter Cleverley, whose works, Time Pieces, are at the Milford Gallery until April 8, paints as a result of deep thought rather than spontaneous decisions.

His work might be described as transcendental landscapes. Amid waves of cloud-like forms a ring coalesces and within it there is a soft seascape from which a broad, soft star emerges. The star shapes are contrasted with bright, clear crosses, counterpointed by a geometrical cube of colour in many of the paintings.

What is intended is a contrast between faith and the realities of modernity. But these human moments are lost in the clouds of nature and only here and there can they coalesce into islands of mediated thought.

Despite the luminous subtlety of the painting, these works, which go beyond the more specifically landscape images that Cleverley has painted, are almost thought out of existence. Only some achieve tension between the conflicting elements. Notable is a small work, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and the heavy, driven clouds of Ten Ways to Be By.

A big exhibition by Cleverly is a long-awaited event in Auckland but only some of these paintings fulfil the expectation. Others are made odd by a predilection for a strange mauve colour and the uncertain feeling that one is finding less than the painter intended.