John Baldessari's Billboard on a Karangahape Rd carpark show the varied aspects of artistic work. Photo / Paul Estcourt.
Big is good, we are told, and nothing is much bigger in display and design than a 22m billboard.
Since last century there has been a good deal of interaction between the art of the billboard and the fine arts. Every artistic trend has been reflected in the design of publicity, even such extreme trends as conceptual art.
Lately in Auckland, we had Billy Apple applying his trademark to billboards that endorsed a talkshow host. Now we have prominent American artist and teacher John Baldessari creating a work that is billboard-sized and hanging it high on the Grafton Bridge end of Karangahape Rd.
This is the third art billboard sponsored by Artspace and the Langham Hotel. Baldessari was one of the principal artists working in conceptual art in California as early as the 1960s. One style of conceptual art established then was that an idea was lettered in words across a plain background. Since then this style has been developed to incorporate a variety of lettering and all sorts of messages considered to have resonance - from philosophy to jokes.
The message on this billboard is simple, "LEARN TO DREAM". It is aimed to make us pause to think about our ambitions and visions.
Where does the art come in? Perhaps it lies in the choice of colour which is a pleasing blue. Perhaps it lies in the choice of typeface. The artist has worked with a famous New Zealand typographer, Joseph Churchward, and the lettering is Churchward Montezuma 1960 Extra Bold. This typeface has big rectangular serifs and the upright strokes have a heavy curve on one side. The effect is to create a feeling of a heavy balustrade with weighty foundations to each letter and a heavy cornice.
The message may be simple but the poster gives it carrying power and it can be read in the split second of driving past. It certainly has more strength and meaning than the first effort in the same place by et al with wave shapes that were simply puzzling.
Nothing could be further from this simple public art than the complex private decision-making of the Expressionist art of Virginia Leonard. Her paintings are a riot of vivid colour and the only analogy for them is symphonic music. What makes the paintings a little different from similar work that has been done everywhere since Kandinsky launched the style back in 1911, is that after the initial painting, the artist pours resin over the layers and gives them a polished surface that sets them back a little in space.
Then, when the resin is set, she dashes arpeggios of colour and line on to the initial surface, sometimes with gouts of thick paint that stand up in relief.
The nervous energy of the paintings and the colour makes all of them initially appealing but gradually some emerge as more effective than others. The paintings gather extra force when there are dark areas near the top and the colours emerge from this as they do in Jardin de la Maison.
The dabs on the resin surface often appear arbitrary but when they follow forms and add to the atmosphere as in La Lune Bleue they really add life to the work. Also, as is often the case with such work, it is particularly impressive when it is big. One giant work is all hectic red with an odd title that refers to the activities of Louis of France: I Hear You Like to Make Keys as a Hobby.
Quite different from Leonard's intuitive work is the careful restraint of the illustrative work of Andrew Barns-Graham at Sanderson Contemporary Art in Parnell. His show called The Passage Between is a suite of portraits of young women. Each portrait has a landscape background of forest, lake and river. So accurately has he imagined the landscape that the show is accompanied by a little map that indicates where the women were standing and in what direction the artist was looking.
The landscapes are varied but the women are formulaic. Young, wide eyed and good-looking, they are just this side of glamour models and a little unreal.
Most are seen directly and Maria, the one whose pose is varied, seems to be better related to the steep banks of the river behind her. This clever show is a remarkable feat of imagination but falls short of establishing any meaningful link between his attractive nymphs and the landscape they inhabit. Nevertheless, the whole exhibition has undeniable charm.
From poster to pinhole - the Auckland Festival of Photography continues apace with big group shows at a number of galleries. Most are a predictable mixture of documentary and art but there is one unusual show called Lapilli by Darren Glass at Anna Miles.
Glass constructs his own pinhole cameras that have no lenses. He was commissioned to do a photo essay on Tongariro National Park and used his cameras to make extraordinarily evocative contact prints. Particularly attractive are little circular prints of Mt Ngaruahoe.
Then he used a home-made sequencing camera to record walks through valleys and streams. These are pleasant but the show is notable for one splendid large contact print of waterfalls throughout the park.
Heavy rain made the waterfalls leap and the power of their flow and the detail of their rocky surrounds is caught spectacularly in this large sequence. Only the presence of a couple of shots of Ohakune's famous carrot are incongruous alongside the dramatic force of the water.
This show is not noticeably better than the highly competent work that fills the big exhibitions of photography but the unusual technique adds to its appeal.
This week at the galleries
What: Learn to Dream, by John Baldessari
Where and when: Karangahape Rd (Grafton Bridge end), to August
TJ says: Concept art meets billboards.
What: Let Them Eat Cake, by Virginia Leonard
Where and when: Oedipus Rex Gallery, Khartoum Place, to July 27
TJ says: Abstract expression lives on with a flourish.
What: The Passage Between, by Andrew Barns-Graham
Where and when: Sanderson Contemporary Art, 251 Parnell Rd, to June 22
TJ says: Conventional pretty girls in unconventional landscape.
What: Lapilli, by Darren Glass
Where and when: Anna Miles, 4J Canterbury Arcade, to July 5
TJ says: Tongariro National Park seen memorably through a pinhole.
OPINION: There's enough for old-school and new-school fans alike.