Art with the weight of darkness and lift of light

By T.J.McNAMARA

Art is the child of light and dark. Peter James Smith at the Judith Anderson Gallery surrounds his vivid painting of skies shot with light with a thick darkness that makes them more potent and pushes them towards being emblems rather than just representations.

The paintings present dramatic depictions of much-studied New Zealand scenery and make full use of the spectacular lighting of sunrise, sunset and the night sky.

Smith also has a penchant for linking landscape to the great processes of science and thought, through hand-written historical references, quotations, indices, diagrams and mathematical formulae on the surface of the work.

There are also lines which seem to be random but reinforce the idea of the journeying of the mind and also link the big areas of darkness to the landscape, giving them additional weight of meaning.

A typical Smith work is An Expatriate's Journey which shows Cape Reinga and, significantly, the turbulent meeting of the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean on the Columbia Bank. It also has a line that shows a direct journey to the Cape then becomes confused, suggesting a thoughtful, troubled return. It is this line and the presence of something white on the horizon - soul or cruise ship - that lifts the painting above a well-executed topographical illustration.

The extra tension and suggestion that Smith can confer is also seen in the sweep of Ninety Mile Beach in a superb painting of weather called The Tasman Front.

There are some paintings where the extra marks do not match the suggestions offered by the rich landscapes. The splendour of the Sutherland Falls is in no way matched by the simple addition of a map of the same area made during the Acheron Survey of 1851.

Yet formulae for establishing the apparent magnitude of stars give real magic to the initially more commonplace subject of Views from an Upstairs Window.

Smith's combination of mathematician and painter has many precedents but is unusual in modern times. This exhibition shows, as usual, that it is a very effective one. It is worth noting that the exhibition is sold out.

At Artis Gallery, in Parnell, Pamela Wolfe surrounds her enlarged portraits of roses and rosebuds with darkness. She also places a darkness at the heart of the roses.

The black background is not entirely effective. There is a heavy ground laid on the surface of the paintings and it shows in the black as texture which catches the light and robs the darkness of depth.

But the darkness at the heart of the flowers really works and gives these paintings at their best a hint of symbolic power that recalls William Blake's poem, The Sick Rose: "The invisible worm/That flies in the night ... Has found out thy bed/Of crimson joy."

These big roses are painted rather heavily with thick petals, but this clumsiness is compensated for by the rosebuds, which appear like eyes spying on their mature counterparts with suspicion.

This gives a sense of strangeness to Full Pink Rose and Buds and to Pink Rose where the vivid flower has a bud lurking underneath it like a secret menace.

The theatrical contrast and large scale of Wolfe's work is counterpointed in this exhibition by the slender grace of Elizabeth Thomson's ranks of the juvenile and mature forms of the lancewood leaf in bronze.

Light and dark is the subject of two of the three artists at the Vavasour/Godkin Gallery.

Jillian Karl paints fields of darkness and differentiates some areas with little workings of grey to demonstrate how we perceive changes. Kathryn Stevens in her best work, such as Wire, gets tension by dislocating a pattern of light lines by a discordant thin black line.

The triumph of the show is work by an artist new on the scene. Emma Febvre-Richards is more concerned with shape than contrasts of light and dark, although there is one delightful suite of her wall sculptures that plays with bright, icy transparency.

The most remarkable work in the show is made from a yellow plastic called Elastomer. Her Topos

IV takes a four-square frame and stretches it with a weight so that it becomes at once a sculpture, a hanging and an interesting image of the process of change. It is a delicious and lively work.

Lastly, and not to be missed (it runs until September), is Multistylus Programme, a show of some new acquisitions to the splendid Chartwell Collection at the New Gallery.

Considerations of light inform a number of these works but there is little darkness. Jim Speer's lightboxes are illuminated from within and Bill Culbert accumulates a host of jars on a tabletop and sets lights in a number of them.

Australian John Nixon has a series of orange paintings that show the response of various materials to the impact of light.

The bright light of a flickering television gives satiric point to a sculpture by Mikala Dwyer. Only Patrick Pound and Dale Frank use black to intensify their colour and their images.

In a whimsical coda, Seraphine Pick kills the electronic light that comes from a television by painting a naive landscape over the screen. It is full of innocent light. The child is born again.