Traditional trio let emotions fly

Pippa Blake's The Earth Rolling Onwards. Photo / Steven McNicholl

The 4th Triennial with its theme Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon is under way in five locations around the city. It was heralded by the Cut Collective who made-over Auckland Art Gallery's Art Lounge with stencils and spray painting. They set the tone by being strenuously modern, bright, simple and ironic. The Triennial takes time to digest and will be reviewed on these pages later.

It offers a startling contrast to three exhibitions by established artists who work in more traditional ways. Two, which are in Parnell, are autobiographical and relate to memories and emotions recollected in peace or anger.

At the Jonathan Grant Gallery, Susan Wilson's work is notable for its thick, clotted brushwork which confers a strong, painterly quality typically in an image that exploits the dense weave of a flax kete. Without forcing the issue, the basket is made more than just a picture.

For an expatriate like Wilson it is a serious symbol of the Aotearoa where she grew up and the intensity devoted to the handling of the paint and colour conveys this. The show, called The Anguish of Departure, is about what we retain in memory of what we had to leave behind.

At times the nostalgia is not localised and, very originally, combines past experience with still-life. Art of the past that has gripped the artist's imagination is represented by postcards on the studio wall. In front of this background is a more immediate experience represented by such things as oranges, bottles, cups or even a favourite dog. The painting of these things is rich and convincingly solid.

The single most impressive of these paintings is Blood Oranges (Spanish Still Life). The fruit is fiercely painted, while a postcard of a painting by El Greco, freely painted, evokes the past, Spain and the expatriate experience all at once. And the paint quality is very fine. The setting of the painter's studio and the act of painting itself, which strongly conveys physical sensation and intense emotion, reinforces the strong sense of personality which was so much a part of Wilson's previous exhibitions.

For a naked sense of the artist's personality there is not much that could match Jacqueline Fahey's exhibition Expose at the Bath Street Gallery. This show is also totally autobiographical and refers, as often in the past, to her domestic life with her late husband, the innovative psychiatric physician, Fraser Macdonald.

The paintings are notable for their vivid blue and red colours. The stridency of these colours is exactly suited to the extreme tension of relationships now seen from the perspective of age.

The work that sums up the raw emotion of the show is The Passion Flower in which the unmistakable figure of the artist in black which appears in all the paintings is observing from a corner. Spread out among the passion flowers is a nude male body - a previous source of intense desire. One bloom is crushed in his hand. The painting also features Adam and Eve and dogs fighting futilely over a bone.

There are two elements in this painting that are particularly Fahey. Hydrangeas feature everywhere and in this work they are spectacularly well painted. The other frequent element is the use of speech balloons and touchingly in this work the words are, "I can hardly remember".

In fact Fahey can remember, as other paintings in the show make quite clear. Don't Ask is an early situation with a child, a high chair, a sink and a sofa and an introspective husband smoking. Porirua Hospital shows patients gardening. Birds as souls, spirits or ideas are gathered over the scene but do not take flight.

Then the world expands in The Double Take. Karl Marx is there with a sledge hammer for impact. Social issues reign. Figures taken from Bosch or Breughel stagger along - the blind leading the blind. A vivid red sports car leaps into prominence. It suggests freedom and by the time we reach The Yellow Brick Road the white birds are all flying free but as they fly they darken into something like the portentous crows in van Gogh's last desperate painting of a wheatfield.

In all this hectic shouting about one person's life and loves there is enough independence of time, place and circumstance in its drama to make it universal. The show triumphs over all its oddities of composition and awkward drawing to make something unique in our art.

The third exhibition is the work of Pippa Blake in the new gallery behind the Louis Vuitton shop in downtown Queen St. The elegance of the surroundings belies the turbulence of the work.

The show is called Journey and the paintings convey a sense of travelling. In some ways this is literal. We get the sense of being in a car driving into the night, or on a boat pushing through mist. The metaphorical sense of seeking is much stronger.

Two paintings, both called Hibernia Prow, are linked to sea voyaging. The journey is into a misty space and the vessel indicated by broken energetic brush strokes suggest emotion in the course of change.

The most effective painting is sombre. The Earth Rolling Onwards has a vigorous jag of road that leaps forward into darkness, past a range of hills touched with red light and a distant horizon of hope. This is highly dramatic work. The whole exhibition shows a great gain in size and assurance on Blake's previous work seen here. It is the work of a very considerable, direct painter.

AT THE GALLERIES

What: The Anguish of Departure, by Susan Wilson
Where and when: Jonathan Grant, 280 Parnell Rd, to March 20
TJ says: Expatriate painter and teacher locks the past in paintings and postcards with the present in still-life, all done in thick, luscious paint.

What: Expose, by Jacqueline Fahey
Where and when: Bath Street Gallery, 43 Bath St, Parnell, to March 27
TJ says: A furiously energetic evocation of past and passion in vivid colour shows Fahey has lost none of the shock power that makes her unique.

What: Journey, by Pippa Blake
Where and when: Louis Vuitton, 56 Queen St, to March 28
TJ says: The theme of journeying by land and sea and through life is made dramatic and, at times, darkly melancholic in vigorously painted images.

For gallery listings, see www.nzherald.co.nz/go/artlistings