Breaking through the mist

By T.J McNAMARA

There is an appealing kind of art that uses suggestion rather than statement, where nothing is sharply defined but everything is shrouded in mist that allows the imagination space to roam.

Such soft hints and oblique references fill the delightful work of Nadine Arrieta at the Chiaroscuro Gallery. Her work offers soft, atmospheric landscapes that evoke the dimness of distant memory, of further shores and roads not taken.

Her paintings consistently use evocative horizontal bands that recall but do not describe the sea, the horizon and the sky. Counterpointing these horizontals is a decisive vertical line, like an intervention.

All the forms are soft-edged, and exceptionally fine use is made of the weave of canvas or the texture of paper to emphasise the diffuseness without loss of structure.

What distinguishes these paintings is a lovely use of colour to establish mood.

In some of them a figurative element intervenes and there is a face or, in the case of a two-part work called Interval Series VII, a dark figure that dissolves into the red mists of memory.

Yet the paintings do not really require these figures or faces. The mood is established without their help in such striking work as Interval Series VI, with its vivid red intersected by a dark, yet luminous, column.

In the most powerful painting, Simultaneity, the figurative element is reduced to eyes staring through the mist that veils a window. Here again we have that mysterious and fertile ambiguity. Any wall or any fence has an ambiguity about it, it keeps somebody in or somebody out and the rich colour and ambiguous space of this painting effectively emphasises its ghostly, spiritual, mysterious quality.

The visionary beauty of these paintings is emphasised by the way white is dragged across the surface of the painting by dry-brush work over deeper saturated colours that have probably been painted wet into wet. The dragged white is particularly effective in the works on paper and is used superbly to give tension to what might otherwise be too-sweet pink in a work such as Interval Series II.

Here, as elsewhere, the white is a blessing, falling like rain on the vision.

White plays an important part, too, in the equally effective visionary landscapes of Garry Currin at the McPherson Gallery.

This artist has also for many years created visions in his own idiom where land and sea are vaguely discernible. He hints at voyages in unknown seas: whaling voyages in the Cruise of the Cachalot, named after a famous book on whaling. Appropriately this image is tensioned by the imprint or rope rigging.

Much more soft and deliberately romantic is Sea Poem and the rising mists of History II give the work a mythical quality of arrival at an unknown land that we can people in our imagination to explain whatever mystery troubles us.

This soft, drifting mystery is in contrast to the surge of power that pulls everything together in Charting the Running Flame.

It all comes together in The Cartography of the Captain's Table with its splendid sense of exploration pictorially anchored to a hard, clear rock in the foreground.

These paintings also make use of white, not just as mists, but also as sharp, clear, geometric accents which link imagination to the reality of the surface.

This exhibition is an addition to the fine body of work that Currin has produced consistently over many years.

The show is accompanied by work by Rex Armstrong which is based on bright surfaces reinforced with resin and shining with bright fashion colours, such as Angel Blue and Japanese Orange.

These colours are marked by spasmodic dashes of pigment which, while abstract, suggest poise and style.

There is a disturbing, almost overwhelming precision of statement in the work of Monique Jansen at the Vavasour/Godkin Gallery.

Her work consists of immense numbers of tiny columns of dots connected by lines ranked on a network of horizontals. To create it requires immense application, precision and care.

The precision and regularity should make each work like a piece of printed material but the result is much more important and exciting than any mechanically produced pattern.

Here and there the artist adds a tiny vertical of orange threaded through the prevailing red. These elements are clearly perceptible only in close-up viewing, yet at any distance they add waves and shifts - and the unexpected - to the regularity of the surface.

The show is dominated by one large painting, Relay, where faint ruling under the surface darkens the middle of the work and a slight dragging of some elements adds vertical hints. The whole forms an immense cascade of red, falling, yet rigidly organised. The way the colour extends from the top to the bottom gives an advantage over other smaller works which have bands of white at the top and the bottom.

The work has a puritan purity but irregularities give it life and make it endearing, as well as impressive.