A whisper, a groan, a howl

By T.J. McNAMARA

Critics usually have a phrase like "articulating a response" for what they do. Sometimes the response turns out to be not very articulate. Exhibitions this week might well evoke a whisper, a groan and an anguished howl rather than a verbal response.

The temptation to whisper is the response to the still, abstract qualities of the exhibition of screens at the Vavasour/Godkin Gallery until April 13.

One of the screens, by Bill Riley, is called Whisper and, like most of the work , it extends the concept of screens to wall relief sculpture in layers. Also like most of the show, it is transparent - layers of perspex in delicate shades of blue that change as they overlap.

The only free-standing screen is by Kathryn Stevens. It is aluminium mesh and involves an optical effect. Elsewhere there is much delicacy and subtlety.

Most impressive in this stylish show is a lovely, untitled work by Deborah Crowe. This screen hangs from the ceiling and is filled with mysterious, luminous light. It is a digital print on PVC mesh and has the intricate use of lines that is characteristic of her work. The shadowy lines are the vehicle for colour of the most fresh and inventive kind.

The groan that goes up in the McPherson Gallery is not provoked by the quality of the work, which is of the highest order, but a groan of self-pity by the critic who must try to do justice to the nature of abstract visual effects in words.

The paintings of Bobbie Douglas Cooke (until April 6) are brought forward from the wall to emphasise their surfaces. These surfaces have a highly polished transparency and each work has two colours layered one over the other. The colours are energised because they are vivid auto enamel with lots of mica glittering in them.

The process of their making is mysterious. The bottom layer seems treated with some sort of resist medium so the top layer can be peeled back in a way that gives loose, chancy patterns.

The effect is lyrical, dancing and totally captivating in the largest paintings in the show. The effect is a little less intense on a smaller scale.

There has been one attempt to put words to the paintings. An elegant catalogue points out the origin of the patterns in knitting. The paintings are all called Cyberknitting, although the workings of purl and plain are really only apparent in Cyberknitting No 1.

That the works are remotely based on knitting is used to construct an elaborate rhetorical structure about the role of knitting in a woman's world. None of this is really apparent in the work, which is totally independent of gender.

Its very considerable merits lie not in whatever philosophy engendered it but in the powerfully effective visual presence that has been created.

The third exhibition evokes a loud, strangulated howl of anguish. The exhibition of paintings by Saskia Leek at the Ivan Anthony Gallery (until March 30) is one of those false-naive shows where the critic is disarmed because none of the usual criteria applies. The drawing can be bad, the composition obvious, the paint quality awful, the colour dim - and it is all supposed to be forgiven because of the immediacy of the naive approach.

The position is compounded when the naivety is combined with a post-modern irony that also plays tricks with conventional values, mostly by sneering at them. Irony will be the death of art yet.

Then why give it attention at all? For two reasons: one that the exhibition has the saving grace of humour, an unusual thing in art. The second is that the artist has been given a lot of prominence in the South Island. In 1997 Leek was the recipient of the Olivia Spencer Bower Award and was a participant in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's Visiting Artists Programme.

In the exhibition that resulted, the eloquent catalogue essay was written by no less a person than Justin Paton, the gallery's curator of contemporary art and editor of Landfall, and he was ecstatic in its praise.

What are the paintings like? They are funny little awkward pale images of utterly stereotyped subjects: a cottagey house with picket fence and flower garden, an all-blue interior with a blue tablecloth and a candelabra; a triptych of Winter with one piece a bird with a seed in its beak, the second an icy lake and the third a bright red sun shining on snowy pine-trees; and Hope, another triptych with a simple yellow flower, a simple leaping dolphin and a simple, ill-drawn, yellow cottage.

It is all almost unbearably twee but, hellishly, deliberately so. It is childish but meant to be childish - an evocation of memory.

It is a grossly uneven show. Only once or twice does Leek bring it off - with a funny painting with a budgie to end all twittering budgies perched on an obvious branch and piping two little red notes. The second time is a wry painting of a woman with red hair in front of a house and a hill, smoking a cigarette and with a knowing glance that defines her personality.

The rest of the paintings you would not give a second look to if they were in a second-hand shop.