The galleries: Thrust and aggression add vitality

Distilled Temptress by Rohan Wealleans. Picture / Richard Robinson

It is always a pleasure to see a good artist get better. Rohan Wealleans established himself with his special use of paint. He laid on layer after layer of paint and when it had gone hard, he carved into the surface so the layers showed like contour lines. This was a technique that seemed sufficient in itself and these revelations of inner structure won him at least one art award.

Then he made a feature of the fragmented pieces carved from the surface and extended his work into three dimensions with bulging elements standing clear of the plane of the painting. Another development was to create still-life objects made of paint.

Throughout this he had his special range of chemical, artificial colour which was arbitrary, individual and almost bordering on gross.

All these features survive in his show called Rocococococo at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until April 16 where they are more integrated and forceful than before. All the works are three-dimensional reliefs and there are elements of thrust and aggression that add vitality. The fashionable desire never to appear slick sometimes produces clumsiness, especially at boundaries between one part of the form and another.

The vitality lies in the visual invention. A typical work is Distilled Temptress. There is the usual play of shapes carved from layers of paint. These are built up into a landscape with two vents which dribble rather than explode. Between the layered areas is an intricate natural pattern of purple which runs down to a boundary beyond which there is a special orange and places where the layers unfold rather than are carved.

This would make a fascinating invented landscape but erupting from the surface is a big irregular shape in blue and pink that contrasts with the rest of the work.

It makes many emotional readings possible - natural and artificial, timeless and sudden, yielding and aggression.

The title work, Rocococococo, is equally bold but even more intricate. Here the colour is an intricate play of green and brown. Strange fungi spring from the surface of the painting but they are unified by the colour except for one big blue excrescence.

The strangeness of these paintings is carried over into sculptured exotic fruit that hang from brackets on the walls. These have a predominant colour and are clever inventions although deliberately clumsy about the edges of the brackets that support them. Yet they are unique in New Zealand art.

When the work of an overseas artist arrives without much trumpeting in advance we have no way of placing the art in any developmental sequence but must see it as complete in itself.

The work of Israeli artist Michal Rovner, at the Gow Langsford Gallery until Saturday, is mature and confident with a deep sense of history.

Of the three works in glass cases - the ubiquitous "vitrines" - Chinese Calculator is the most impressive. Inside the glass case are 10 lines of tiny human figures in groups projected mysteriously on to a fractured piece of black stone.

These figures are in constant movement. They go a little way forward then jump backward, constantly changing in simple ways but in combinations that are hard to predict.

At one level they are like the workings of an abacus. At another, they symbolise generations of people who leave their inscriptions on stone. The effect is fascinating.

We are lucky that in one week we have a local artist reaching maturity, an overseas artist of considerable stature and, if you want to try to pick future winners, in Out with the New at Oedipus Rex Gallery until April 15 four artists are having their first showing. They paint thoughtfully and with precision and hint at a return to an emphasis on figure painting in our art schools.