The galleries: The season to be strange

Clive Humphreys’ The Routines of Europe is all ritual and mirrors.

Christmas is coming, but there is an air of solemnity and strangeness rather than merriment in the numerous exhibitions around Auckland this week.

Strangest of all is the work of Clive Humphreys, who is making one of his rare forays from Dunedin to show his paintings at the Lane Gallery until December 18.
Humphreys' black-and-white world owes a good deal to his prints.

It is a world of stark contrast, bright highlights and dark shadows; a world inhabited by lonely men.

They are savants. They lead a regulated existence of quiet ritual and meditation. Yet what they ponder on is erotic, although it is a sanitised and classicising eroticism.

Their detachment from violent passion and the world is symbolised by the way they have horses' heads. These men are linked to the Houyhnhnms of Gulliver's Travels - a race of horses much more rational and detached than humankind.

The whole of this is expressed in images of considerable dreamlike, surrealist force.

Some are very theatrical, and the title of the exhibition is Behind Giotto's Curtain. Giotto was the first painter to dissolve the picture plane and set his scene within a created space.

The title painting is matched by another called The Routines of Europe, where it is as if a curtain has been drawn aside and we can see into a world of ritual and mirrors.

There is a curtain in the Giotto painting and, surprisingly, it is at odds with the perspective of the room.

The horse/man sits with head diffidently bowed in front of a nude female statue and in the presence of a portrait of an authority figure and landscape that together suggest history and culture.

The mirror images of the men/horses drinking tea in The Routines of Europe suggest transplanted rituals, perhaps from England to New Zealand. This notion fills the elaborately decorative work The Chandelier, along with many other symbols of art history and personal image-making.

The two sides of the work are exactly symmetrical, except the outline of Britain is obverse/reverse with the outline of New Zealand correctly aligned on both sides.

The techniques of the paintings, where sometimes identical images are repeated in different tones, are mysterious but obviously owe a lot to printmaking.

Humphreys' work, always assured, continues to develop in complexity and his special world of intelligent but melancholy horses has considerable resonance and curious tensions.

The world of birds created by W.D. Hammond has become very familiar. The birds symbolise situations both beautiful and sinister.

The four Hammond paintings at the Ivan Anthony Gallery contain no new departures, except that human heads in profile occupy the same space as the birds and share their elegant decoration of intricate foliage.

Yet the sense of the contrast between indigenous and introduced is always hinted at.

In Unknown European Artists one of these profiled forest deities holds a frock-coated figure in his hand. The painting of the background is as inventive as ever, with scraped and dripped textured paint playing its role.

The principal colour has shifted from a dense forest green to something more light and acid. This increases the tension but erodes the suggestive forest atmosphere so much admired in Hammond's work.

It brings these paintings a little closer to the strident effect of the early, angular images which brought the painter to prominence.

Obvious and theatrical tensions made the work of Elizabeth Rees immensely popular when she first appeared on the art scene. The tensions are much more sombre and subtle in her exhibition Figure and Landscape at the Milford Galleries until December 18.

The paintings are mostly landscapes - wooded districts where roads curve behind copses of trees, and the time is twilight when there is a great play of light and shade.

The brooding atmosphere is created with great skill in handling paint; central to the feeling they create are the roads that curve through them or head straight to a horizon.

The effect of the paintings with figures is more specific and tense. This is partly because of the urban setting and partly because the female figures themselves are tense.

Nevertheless, the rich ambiguities are still apparent, especially in an exceptionally well-drawn woman in a coat striding forward on a balcony. The action is exactly real but the atmosphere is dreamlike and takes it into the realm of metaphor. It all adds up to a fine, rich exhibition.

Its serious tone and traditional technique are in contrast to the two shows at the McPherson Gallery until December 18. One is notable for its humour and the other for its sense of style and time.

Genuinely funny art is rare. Sweet Ride by Paul Judd can make you laugh out loud. He uses quaint, riveted aeroplanes and simple boats as symbols of situations. They are peopled by figures bare-headed or goggled. If they are futile they are in a plane with a small engine. If they are optimistic, with a new hat on head, they are in a boat and the work is called Launch. Wittiest of all is Always Take a Navigator.

In the other room Clare Burlinson is showing women in hats from the 1960s. Whether their eyes are shadowed by a brim, or the hats take their hair well back, they speak eloquently of high fashion and make lively paintings.