Anxiety at the crossroads

By T.J. McNAMARA

Pop princess Britney Spears' new film is called Crossroads. This is the fashionable but useful word for places of angst and decision. One of the principal exhibitions this week is called Intersections and literally shows crossroads.

Intersections is at the Milford Galleries until May 6. It is by Elizabeth Rees, who uses her considerable talent in handling paint to create a symbolic atmosphere where roads meet.

The intersections she depicts are at the point where trees give way to wide rural landscapes. She successfully gives the feeling that at this point there is a change and a decision to be made to go forward or to go back. Tension between people who must make such decisions is indicated by figures standing looking toward the intersection. As a symbol of coded communication there are often telegraph poles and wires in the paintings.

These are not illustrations of a particular dilemma. The people looking toward the crossroads are all young men and, as their backs are turned toward the spectator, they have no individual features. Nevertheless, their body language conveys tension and anxiety.

The strange atmospheric effect of the paintings is conveyed by the contrast between the light of the horizon and the dark foliage that marks the edge of the way. All the images are clouded by dry-brushwork which drags the paint horizontally over deeper layers of colour and form.

The overall effect is of a fine suite of paintings but some are more successful than others.

The title painting of the show is one of the earliest and finest works. It reaches toward a distant horizon below a turbulent sky which is expressively painted. There is only a solitary figure in this work, a shadowy presence emerging from the dark. The way will be wide open for him when he turns, but below where he walks is a deep and gloomy ditch.

This work does more than some of the others where flourish of the brushstrokes is sometimes unconvincing. What works for the back of an anonymous head does not describe arms and elbows so well.

The best of the work, Short-Cut Back to Town or Evening on the Edge of Town, have a Wagnerian, mythic quality where the intersections portend great problems and the least of them have a disturbing, surreal feeling.

Another kind of intersection is found at the Sue Crockford Gallery where, until April 20, Denise Kum is showing digital prints derived from an installation she did in Australia. That work shared characteristics with what she did here as a brilliant student before she went to England.

Kum has always shown a fascination with oil and grease and the crawl of oleaginous substances across surfaces and their decay. The work in Australia showed oily, greasy things moving in the manner of geological changes that take place in eons of time.

The photographs of details on show here suggest such changes in the landscape, too, but the substances involved are obviously artificial and chemical. They erupt just like natural forms but they are obviously a contrivance of plastic, membrane slick with oil, powders and string.

These colour photographs have a strong initial impact and details of their textures and the processes they imitate have continuing, if unpleasantly tactile, fascination.

Also curiously fascinating is the work of Roger Mortimer at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until April 20. Here the intersection is between memory, art, religion and reality. The memory is of the artist's mother. The texts, of which the artist makes liberal use, are taken from a notebook she kept as a convent student. The texts become imitation medieval manuscript or are broken up and run together to make a spell.

The notes are simple art history and Madonnas by such names as Raphael and Andrea del Sarto feature largely. Reproductions of these pictures of Mary are everywhere in the show, inscribed on everything from sharks' teeth, pills and books to a lavatory cistern.

The cistern shows Raphael's Sistine Madonna from Dresden. The hand basin that is part of the ensemble harbours sea creatures and the toilet bowl under the cistern has the names of the Evangelists swirling down it and more odd creatures at the bottom.

All these things combine to meet reality in a rosary that is laid out on the gallery floor. It is made up not of beads but of pills and capsules, not linked with a fine chain as they undoubtedly should be, but a rosary nevertheless. The pill at the intersection of the loop has a Raphael Madonna very accurately drawn.

The reality of the mother's sickness, suffering and religion is memorably represented by the modern medicines and the long tradition of motherhood by the reproduction of the religious painting. It is a striking memorial.