Surface values set painting apart

Kim Fisher's Cuprite 6 reflects the influence of crystallography and gemstones.

A textured relief or shaped surface is one aspect of painting that completely sets it apart from the photographed image. It is that element that is the feature of several exhibitions this week.

In a stylish show by Kim Fisher at Starkwhite Gallery (until May 13), the surface of the paintings is often gently three-dimensional.

Fisher is based in Los Angeles and is visiting New Zealand to take up the Elam residency project at the University of Auckland.

Her work is confident academic abstraction, using for the most part triangular shapes, often moving around a centre.

Her special spin on abstraction is to vary the thickness of the image and make sudden changes in the surface which alter the play of light across the canvas. Her other individual element is the use of silk-screen as well as oil paint to introduce natural elements and extend the areas of reference.

All the triangles of her work reflect the clear influence of crystallography and gemstones.

In two of the works, Broken Beryl and Watermelon Tournaline, the screen-printed element is a curve of cut jewels that add special liveliness to the work.

The colour reflects the colours of the stones. Broken Beryl has subtle shades of blue and green and the tournaline painting uses a delicious combination of pinks and green.

The whole system is seen at its best in Cuprite 6, which uses orange, red and black. The play of red is accented by the shaped nature of the canvas and enlivened by a diagonal cut across the corner. A black screen-printed crystal element causes turmoil as it plunges into the red but emerges clean on the other side.

This is a highly accomplished show, although limited a little by the diffident size of the work.

Surfaces are everything in I Got Urges by Rohan Wealleans at the Ivan Anthony Gallery (until May 20). His principal urges are to dig deep but push outwards in spiky aggression, and to enjoy the grotesque.

Wealleans was a visiting fellow at the University of Otago and the exhibition of his work was on show last month at the university's offices in Queen St.

It featured his established style of painting - innumerable layers of soft paint and then slicing into them with a scalpel to expose the strata - and also work based on horror films, and work where big spiky forms jumped out of the painting.

Much of this seemed experimental and crudely brash. At this show at the Ivan Anthony Gallery the experiments have been modified - not tamed, but more expressive and without the shouting.

The show is copious in its invention.

There are big sculptures, such as Blue Brain , which drips with blue and gold, cut into wherever the artist feels the urge to indicate layers of experience.

There are ceramics roughly shaped and dripping with glaze, adorned with little hanging necklaces of chunks of layered paint.

The best of these is a piece in the foyer that sprouts something like the horns of a faun and obscurely hints at bacchic revelry.

The works that bring everything together most powerfully are those where the shape in the frame resembles a map, where the terrain has been mined to show what is underneath the surface, and where the same terrain is fringed with a multitude of spiky eruptions which suggest aggressive emotions coming from hidden depths.

A work such as Large Horrogami , enshrined in its big frame, manages to suggest deep passions without the need for references to horror pictures.

Wealleans' work, though never beautiful, is always powerful and continues to develop in a completely individual way.

Only a few days are left to see the double exhibition at Whitespace Gallery in Ponsonby, where Christine Bell-Pearson and Gaye Jurisich have exhibitions.

For each, surface plays an important part.

The thoughtful work of Bell-Pearson is concerned with layers of history.

Many of her works have a base layer and over that a translucent layer that suggests the way we see the past "through a glass, darkly".

The variety of techniques emphasising positive and negative photography and the permanence of ceramics are also used to evoke the way history is perceived.

The artist uses indecipherable writing to suggest how acutely we are aware of the difficulty of understanding other cultures as well as their allure.

The sadness of photographs - always a reminder of the dead - plays an important part in Bell-Pearson's evocations of the past, which are at their best when subjected to a geometry, such as the circles in No 5, which lock the multitude of references into a tight composition.

Jurisich makes what her neat little catalogue calls sculpto-paintings - deep relief surfaces of artificial flowers and discarded commonplace objects sprayed with monochrome colour - so that familiar forms are resurrected to a new status. A play of light over the surfaces is always interesting and the sense of revival is strong, but the monochrome colour suggests something mechanical about their creation.