Works show there's beauty in repetition

By T J McNAMARA

The idea that art must be a picture of something is long gone. Today we demand that a painting must be more than illustration. It must have some element of ritual or magic.

How to get the magic into the painting? Some artists repeat the same geometric elements, so the painting becomes the equivalent of a chant - a single-syllable repetition similar to some modern music by Arvo Part or Phillip Glass.

It does not have to be solemn. We have a couple of bright examples which have been allowed to take over the walls at Lopdell House in Titirangi until June 6.

Sara Hughes has covered the western wall of one room with a reverberating pattern of squares. Their precision and regularity comes from the use of vividly coloured sticky tape, an extension of her previous work, which was done with many adhesive dots.

The effect is joyous and vibrant, although the size of this big work in the small room means it does not play the optical tricks that might be expected.

It cannot be read as a tunnel or a pyramid. Yet the sheer exuberance of its colour in this stable, ritually repeated square form gives it a potent, happy, candy-coloured magic.

The formality of the work is emphasised by contrast with the irregular shapes painted on the other walls. Against a bright background, highly irregular shapes float around like pond creatures with a paisley pattern at their heart.

The contrast of natural shape and industrial pattern is lively, but just how it links with the big, geometrical wall is not clear and the transition is not managed well.

In the main gallery, Simon McIntyre has also painted the entire west wall. His work has precise horizontal bars coming from each side, each interrupted at some point along the horizontal and there gains a little horizontal top, like a straight-edged version of Gordon Walter's koru.

The quality of the work comes from the rhythm of these intervals; repeating themselves but never the same.

Simon McIntyre used this style in a couple of rich paintings that graced an unexpectedly lively exhibition in the old army building converted to a gallery on North Head a few weeks ago.

There they were given a special quality by being on weathered plywood. Here, on canvas, the impact of these rhythmic variations comes from the colour relationships. Whether the small versions on show work depends on your reaction to colour.

Peter James Smith, at the Judith Anderson Gallery until May 29, paints spectacular coastal landscapes with dramatic sunsets and other stunning effects of light, with a blackboard occupying the rest of the painting.

The magic comes from the drama of the light in the sky, and added resonances brought in from history, poetry, mathematics and science inscribed across the paintings.

A superbly painted sunset is accompanied by the original equations that established the speed of light.

The concept is more visually complex in The White Line, where the bubbling of a stream is white at the centre of the painting, light falls geometrically on one side and, on the other, a bright whiteness is conveyed by a wandering line. The whole takes on a special quality linked to the magic of white.

When the artist is painting Mitre Peak shrouded in mist, the region's early explorers are listed. The magic of Coleridge's great Rime of the Ancient Mariner is evoked by text and a diagram of the wandering of an albatross.

Peter James Smith does not always pull it off. He is a professor of mathematics, but a dilettante musician. Painting a deft picture of a violin and calling it The Lark Ascending does not give us enough emotional material to evoke either the lark or Ralph Vaughan Williams' wonderful romance for violin. More than just an illustration is needed to make Mozart's piano an image that contains layers of meaning. Magic in these works lies only in their titles.

The magic of circles and repetition is found in the impressive work of Christine Bell-Pearson at Whitespace gallery in Newmarket until May 28.

The special quality of her work also comes from her skills as a ceramicist. Her pots have an archaic Greek quality and she takes photographs of them and arranges them in repeating patterns, interspersed with Greek texts and photographs of people and plants.


The circles and the script take on a sense of ritual power that suggests both history and the alchemy that turns soft clay into enduring ceramic.

The effect is reinforced when the usually shadowy colour is transformed with the hot power of red.

Ritual and magic are part of the big paintings by Fatu Feu'u that are at the Warwick Henderson Gallery until May 30. These paintings of Polynesian gods emerging as masks are so popular they are all sold.