KEY POINTS:
In the show of painting by Peter Wichman at Orexart, among many striking images is one called Artists.
On a circular stage, a middle-aged performer in a bowler hat juggles with three figures, accompanied by a clown playing on a pipe. The juggler is squat and ugly,
no graceful performer but an aging journeyman carnival entertainer.
The figures being juggled are in cramped positions. One, at the top of the painting, hangs in the air in the position of a tortured victim of some obscure inquisition. The exhibition, on until June 1, is titled Nostalgia.
This week in Auckland the arts scene itself juggles with artists and catches them in a variety of positions.
Wichman's position is a literary one. His paragraphs imply a narrative. They are like illustrations to grim short stories incorporating some dark Kafkaesque vision.
At other times the references are to the visual arts. Many of the poses hint at Goya and there is more than a nod in the direction of our own Tony Fomison.
The suited men who inhabit these paintings have dark, saturnine faces while the women's plastered countenances are pasty, but with hectic colour in the cheeks. They seem to interact savagely with each other although they seldom touch.
A typical work is Trio, where three men play a game on the floor as boys might play with trucks - but they are playing with lumps of red flesh.
In more crowded compositions, such as Ballroom Dance, people dance - under a chandelier - in a chain towards a door that leads to an abyss.
Not all the paintings are melodramatic. Some are just intense distillations of collective misery, as in Stones, where figures, all restrained in some way, crouch on a bleak shore abandoned by the world.
This show is a dark vision of the way people react with emotional brutality towards each other in gatherings in many different circumstances.
In the past Wichman's grim paintings have seemed historical, almost fancy-dress. In this show his savage tableaux have been brought up to date.
Regroup Reorder Restore is the catchphrase et al is using to describe re-juggling her contribution to the Venice Biennale.
The rubric is displayed on a big poster in Karangahape Rd and the exhibition itself extends through all the rooms at Artspace, where the show is on until until June 9.
It is another dark vision. What she has done is to take the portaloos that appeared in her piece and dismantle them. Cars once arrived in New Zealand in a state known as CKD, or "completely knocked down". At Artspace the floor is covered with the knocked-down pieces of loos, toilet-paper holders prominent, while the base and roof of several of them - driven by a noisy mechanism - creak back and forth across the floor.
There is plenty of hectoring, lecturing noise in the show. In a small side-room there is one complete shell of a lavatory occupied by a sub-woofer that belches out talk. Nearby, a crumpled screen of the sort lecturers use, stands useless against the wall.
Everything in the extensive display has been changed, or is in the process of changing. Two TV screens that connected Venice with Auckland show unintelligible messages.
A projection at the end of the gallery shows a landscape with watchtowers. Everything is grey and dismal.
It is possible, like the great German painter Anselm Kieffer, to have a dark vision of life and history, but he manages to make the concentrated symbols of his insights, visually gripping. Et al's grey vision is meandering and dull. But if you want to know what all the fuss was about, go and see it.
At the Whitespace Gallery until May 26 is Sanctumviridis, a collection of virtuoso painting by Sam Foley.
His virtuosity consists of the convincing way he paints the patterns of trunks and dense foliage of trees and the luminous, dappled light on paths that curve between them.
He is not painting the bush but the kind of woodland that characterises city parklands.
The paths are obviously well-trodden, but there are no people. Nevertheless, there is a presence in the woods - not the Wordsworthian sublime, but a modern surreal hint of unease.
The apparent realism and their size give the paintings an immediate impact but their actual feeling is elusive. They perform a remarkable juggling trick of being filled not only with light, growth and energy but an element of disquiet. It makes for a first class exhibition.
Away from the world of dark visions is the delightfully witty and stylish show by Michael Parekowhai at Michael Lett Gallery until June 26. Here a sculpture of a seal in jet-black, with a shape flowing like water, balances on its nose a highly polished version of Duchamp's famous Ready-Made of a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool.
This witty piece - a New Zealander juggling with European art history - will surely be well-received at the Basle Art Fair in Switzerland where it will be exhibited.
Seals play a part in the attractive illustrative work of Geoffrey Arnold in the Morgan Street Gallery in Newmarket until May 31.
Arnold has a reputation as a painter of birds, but here his talents extend to rocky landscapes and seals on the coastline.
The works are in watercolour but the liveliness of both birds and barking seals is matched by the way the solidity of rocks in sea and mountains is convincingly conveyed.
