The galleries: Minimal effects, maximum effort

Late Winter Walk, part of Mal Bouzaid's Ocean Edge II at the Oedipus Rex Gallery. Picture / Dean Purcell

Adolf Loos has a lot to answer for; he may even be the root cause of our leaky buildings. He was a Viennese architect at the turn of the century who declared "ornament was a crime".

He designed clean, flat geometrical buildings with no ornament - not even mouldings around windows. Minimalism was born, and is still with us a century later.

But this is the 21st century and most artists add a spin to their minimalist geometry. The show by Nick Wall called The Game of Yes and No which runs at the Warwick Henderson Gallery until Sunday relies heavily on the severe geometry of rectangle and circle but adds the apparent spontaneity of run and drip.

The severity is emphasised by the use of black and white. Any warmth comes from the lovely linen canvas on which the works are created.

The artist is a protege of Max Gimblett and a big painting in homage to the master has one big swish of paint that might easily be mistaken for Gimblett's work. Its title is Have No Fear in the Fire of the Master, You Will Go Straight Through and, indeed, the rest of the show is different.

Typical are two works, one Here and another Now, where a large, perfect circle is in the centre, surrounded by smaller circles.

Behind the circles runs of thick paint have been allowed to drip vertically but now are mounted horizontally. They balance the geometry with movement and a hint of the workings of chance.

The paintings are large, confident and, in their own way, brilliant, although their formulaic nature robs them of some of their energy. They partake of the master's teaching, but not his drive.

The geometry of some modern Viennese architecture is explicit in the work of Mladen Bizumic at the Sue Crockford Gallery until August 13. He has travelled to Vienna and photographed buildings that are all glass and geometry. No ornament anywhere - and no life either.

The 21st-century spin is the way all the photographs feature a patient dog waiting for somebody, anybody.

These photographs are cold and so is the video on display, which shows ice on the Danube, bare trees and crows making flight to rooky woods. The bare trees are paralleled by glimpses of the bare, sparse nature of the house of the philosopher Wittgenstein, a house typical of Loos' manner. It all makes a cold, clever show.

The painting of Mal Bouzaid at Oedipus Rex Gallery until August 13 is far from cold because the colour is exceptionally strong. The work is minimalist in the way every painting comprises horizontal bands.

In the past these would have been precise horizontals, but Bouzaid varies the line where the colours meet in such a way that they interact with each other to make these boundaries atmospheric.

This atmospheric feeling is based on looking out to sea. The show is called Ocean's Edge. What makes one canvas distinct from another is the mood evoked by the bands of colour.

Sometimes the effect is dramatic as in the reds and golds of Floodtide. Others are pale and meditative, as in Dream Walking, while Breathing Space has an airy lightness.

These compositions are certainly free of the flourish of ornament but in their own way are effective.

A return to architecture is found in an odd show, Modern Soup, by Trenton Garratt at the McPherson Gallery until August 6. The show is mostly drawings in Indian ink on prepared canvas. They have mazes of tall buildings with no ornament except for a satellite dish on top and a multiplicity of tiny windows.

Among the buildings are sharp-edged, geometrical areas of plain black and red.

These look like aerial views of cities but we see the sides, not the top, of the buildings. The images are given a quirky, satirical spin by signs that can be read only if you peer closely. They proclaim: Authentic European Meals, Slow Food, Hernia Clinic, and other more obscene signage. The satire is given more point by overall titles such as Allegory of Gluttony and Lust.

These painstakingly peculiar works share the gallery with equally painstaking paintings by Vivian Ward called The Appearance of Trees. These skilful works show unornamented nature with emphasis on the trunks of trees, the spread of ferns and the spiky patterns of nikau.

The spin that gives these works their individuality is the presence, almost hidden, of a feral dog or a man digging as if to hide something. Her bush is a strange, moody place where bushes grow into the shape of kiwi.

No geometry is present here, nor ornament, just an individual vision conveyed with remarkable precision.