Calculations a compelling factor

The maths in Peter James Smith's Icefall is easy to follow.

Art is often founded on opposites or contradictions. It is the pulling together of apparently irreconcilable things that gives it its compelling power.

Two exhibitions in Auckland this week show this dichotomy. Peter James Smith at the Edmiston Duke Gallery until September 22 is well known for combining his professorial talents for the most abstruse forms of mathematics with his skill in painting Romantic landscapes filled with light in the manner of Turner.

The link with science and mathematics is usually in the same work. At times it is obvious and easily understandable, as in the fine painting called Icefall, which shows the terminal moraine of the Franz Joseph Glacier linked to a diagram which illustrates the stages of the advance and retreat of the terminus.

In other paintings the science is more obscure, as in a group of three paintings. The first shows a sunset landscape with a diagrammatic ray of light playing on it, accompanied by the handwritten equation that calculates the angle of reflection of the light. This is joined by a painting of a prism creating a spectrum. The third is the geometry of the refraction of light.

There is a good deal of black, evoking the blackboards formerly used in teaching and lecturing.

The blackboards come into their own in a series of audacious paintings that copy complicated equations written in chalk. They are in effect still-life paintings of mathematics.

Typical is Censored Regression , a theorem taken from Smith's own book, The Analysis of Failure and Survival Data.

It also contributes to the title of the exhibition, Truth + Beauty which links with Keats' famous lines suggesting they are the same thing. Here the concept is that a mathematical truth is as beautiful as a sublime landscape.

This is further illustrated by The Mathematical Sublime, which deals with a fundamental mathematical concept about the Hebrew aleph zero. As a blackboard still-life it is interesting, but as a painting it is not sublime - we still need the emotional power of light and land or seascape.

Albatross, a painting of sea, sky and a lonely bird, is decorated with poetry from Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. The leaden sea which lay like a load on the mariner's weary eye has much more emotional grip than the scholar's blackboard.

At the Milford Galleries until September 24 is an exhibition of sculpture by Graham Bennett which has a mathematical reference in its title, Squaring the Circle.

Here the combination is engineering combined with natural materials. Most of the sculptures are based on interwoven lattices, such as those of pylons and cranes, enshrining pieces of rock - or, in one case, supporting a series of cups containing seawater. He also uses instruments of measurement as structural elements.

Typical is Other Measures, where a rock supports a cone-shaped station that is poised on sharp compass points. Stacks of open lattice of modular elements recalling a Brancusi Endless Column make up History Repeats. This a floor-standing piece but many of the works hang from the ceiling, notably the rhythmic Around Every Circle.

The invention is paralleled by telling detail. The pylons that carry the seawater are floor-standing. But two similar works project from the wall, each topped by a crescent. Across the crescent two fine wires are stretched, adding a sense of transmission.

This is a fine exhibition, thoughtful and splendidly crafted - and surprisingly varied.

More repetitive, but impressive in its own way, is the sculpture of John Edgar at Artis Gallery, Parnell, until September 24. The work is made from a variety of wonderfully coloured stones cut and polished to a high degree but always keeping the sense of weight that is natural to stone.

The contradiction that gives force to this work is that the stone is cut and joined with a precision that is geometrical and obviously human intervention. In this way Red Core or Green Heart offer contrasts in colour that nevertheless remain an intrinsic part of the stoniness of each piece.

Edgar's work has, over the years, become predictable, but there is a piece of his in the lively exhibition devoted to the Waitakere Laureates at the Corban Estate Gallery which shows his astonishing precision allied to rugged strength as well as delicacy. Called Vein, it is a marble insert into a slab of granite. It is worth a trip out west to see it.