Explosive technique lays colours bare

TSUNAMI TRIBUTE: The impressive and colourful Nuanua tumau is an excellent example of Fatu Feu'u's mature work, and a tribute to Samoa's struggle to rebuild after the devastating tidal wave. Photo / Dean Purcell

Deconstructed works without narrative or focus make impact through sensation

Deconstruction is a fashionable word which involves examining a work of art to get to its spiritual essence. Once past the lively display of fashion garments of the El Jay presentation in the main room at the Gus Fisher Gallery, you will find classic deconstruction work by Nuala Gregory, an academic at the University of Auckland. The apt title of the show is Exploded View, which suggests the process that arrives at these works.

Many of the qualities associated with painting have been stripped away. There is no narrative; this is abstract art. By the same token there is no representation and ideas of formal composition have been stripped away, with no focus in any of the work. The only formal quality it has are edges and these are sometimes blurred.

So what remains? Colour and the painting gesture. Gregory even distances herself from this by making the work look like painting when it is actually prints made with the assistance of the Auckland Print Studio. The artist insists the works in the corridor and the small room make an installation but the variety of sizes gives more the feeling of an orthodox exhibition than of entry into a three-dimensional, coherent world.

One work is big enough to give just a hint of installation, with 65 sheets of A4 paper ranked in rows of six - except there are five sheets at the top. Most of them are yellow with subtle variations that seem more accidental than intended. The yellow spreads across the sheets like a vast blot. The boundaries of the yellow are purely accidental.

So what we are left with is a generalised sensation of yellow. The deconstruction has stripped away everything except the repetitive notes of the same colour. The viewer sees the sensation and carries away only a memory of yellow. Is this enough?

The two rhapsodic essays that accompany the well-designed catalogue evoke philosophers and other artists and even the orgasmic affirmation at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses.

The smaller works contain more in the way of gestures, notably a rich fall of blue. The works are an exposition of a theory and ultimately the rarefied air of art theory does not sustain real energy.

Similar stringencies attend some of the photography by Anne Noble, on show at Two Rooms in Newton, following her second visit to Antarctica. Most of the photographs belong to a series she calls Whiteout Whitenoise. These are small images printed with a huge margin of white paper investigating light and space within the whiteout phenomenon. Some are reduced to white on white without any forms apparent at all. These pure white works all completely dismiss any hint of humans or human activity. The photographs that are purely white-on-white have validity only as part of the whole series of 50 works. They could be anywhere, but in this context they lead to the works with just a gleam that suggests a horizon, or a stony foreground or ripple of snow that sets the context.

The general effect chills the heart. This is a place where one would not like to be and admiration is reserved for the determination that took so many images to convey this desolation.

Much more visually exciting are four big photographs which feature clouds of snow thrown up by the apparatus that clears the snow. Just immense clouds against the dark black of the sky and the fragments of snow at the edge of the cloud, and the textures like swathes of stones that show where the snow landed.

The most spectacular shows two great gushes of snow. Even more impressive is one that records the low Antarctic light making lumps of snow in the foreground cast dark shadows. The cloud reveals a distant mountain with something that looks very like the moon behind its peak. This series is simply called White Noise.

The small photos collectively make an admirable essay and are collected into a book. The four large images are very dramatic and justify their size and the use of black and white.

Upstairs at Two Rooms, a video loop by Clinton Watkins reduces television to line and colour. The shifts in colour on the screen are linked to sounds, most effective when big horizontal bands of colour rise and fall. Where they meet and kiss they generate new colours. Other parts of the sequence are more like static and look like a transmission fault.

Construction rather than deconstruction is characteristic of the colourful work of Fatu Feu'u at the Warwick Henderson Gallery. One exceptionally large painting consists of nearly 80 similar images of a cross within a square. Each image is different in colour and handling and suggests a multiplicity of constructions moving through light and shade.

This can easily be accepted as a tribute to the struggles to rebuild in Samoa after the recent tsunami yet it is also richly decorative celebration.

Other smaller paintings are even more rich in feeling and variety of motif. The outstanding work is Nuanua tumau, an excellent example of the artist's mature work. From a warm arc of energy two sentinel forms stand beside the sea of sharks and fish. Humans stand united on the shore. Beyond them is the sea reaching to the horizon where spirits hover. It is a fine example of the artist's mature work.

Accompanying the paintings are relief constructions of wood and shell, copper and tiles held together with tight lashing of fibre in a traditional way which summon considerable force, especially in Eye of the wind.

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AT THE GALLERIES

What: Exploded View by Nuala Gregory

Where and when: Gus Fisher Gallery, 74 Shortland St, to July 24

TJ says: An installation of works large and small reduced to immediate effects of colour and gesture.

What: Whiteout Whitenoise by Anne Noble; Force Fields by Clinton Watkins

Where and when: Two Rooms, 16 Putiki St, Newton, to August 7

TJ says: Anne Noble records the impact of whiteout in Antarctica in a cumulative series of small photographs and the impact of fountains of snow in large black and white images, while Clinton Watkins makes rhythmic abstracts on video.

What: Fa'aola by Fatu Feu'u

Where and when: Warwick Henderson Gallery, 32 Bath St, Parnell, until July 21

TJ says: Fatu Feu'u uses his colourful vocabulary of forms to suggest structures and the spirit necessary to support resilience in the face of natural disaster.