Art: A power goes with the floe

By T.J. McNAMARA

In a week when Auckland lost one of its landmarks - the tree on One Tree Hill - around the galleries it is a week for landscape.

There are landscapes from the present and the past, landscapes that are real and some that are symbolic. They are cold and warm, rural and urban.

The coldest are at the McPherson gallery in Vulcan Lane. Margaret Elliot is showing work done as a result of a trip to Antarctica sponsored by Creative New Zealand and the paintings give insight into the forms of that remote place. The exhibition is called (ICE)3.



One of the insights given by the paintings is the way in which a landscape that has all the usual features of hill and valley, plain and peak is made more abundantly apparent and forceful when its surface is all snow and ice. The fine painting To the Interior shows this transformation at work.

The paintings show the pressure at work on the ice. There are some strange shapes caused by the erosion of ice peaks by the wind. They cast long shadows and achieve the quality of a strange, unpopulated dream.

More impressive are the paintings which show where the floes formed by pressure make transient forms, a sense of power beyond human control. Outstanding among these paintings is Transient Structure.



The only limitation of the exhibition is the heavy handling that at times misses the transparency and luminosity.

Light and luminosity are the materials with which Felicity West works in the exhibition she shares with Sarah Menzies at the Lane Gallery. The symbolic quality of West's work is indicated by the title Exits and Entrances, because they simultaneously suggest a dawning and arrival and a fading light and departure. They also have enough power to extend this to the soul.



The brighter paintings, such as Exits and Entrances - Pakiri, are heavy, voluptuous hill forms tracked by road. The dark hills in other paintings, where the light just breaks over the horizon, are much more oblique in their references and give much more stimulus to the imagination.

There is not as much intensity of feeling in Menzies' work, although what she paints are small shrines. They have loaded colour and some, like Black Poppy, are very decorative. The ones that push towards a deeper significance - such as Jade Temple - cannot carry the weight of meaning.

The work of Ruth Cole at the Milford Gallery is straightforward representational landscape, though there is an elegaic quality keyed by the sombre colour where light only occasionally breaks hills and slope. The sombre evocation of the rich, untouched past is emphasised by the title, Where the Huia Sang.

The paintings by Simon Morris at the Anna Bibby Gallery around the corner are another territory altogether. The show is called Loop Geometry and this is computer country. An adulatory essay by William McAloon describes the artist's studio hung with computer printouts. This shows how Morris arrives at his images but does not explain their quality, which lies in the painter's elegant sense of interval.

It is the big paintings that work best because they cannot be taken in all at once. As your eye travels around their simple forms the effect is an austere music - but it is a visual music with rhythms, rests and an underlying pattern.

The use of black and white and a simple red emphasise that this is rarefied, minimalist music played on a single instrument. McAloon insists that the patterns are bound to nature but filtered through the medium of pure mathematics. If nature includes the human touch then these works are much more subtle than the printouts that begat them. They do have an interesting paint quality to go with their mathematics and music and, remotely, they might be considered the distillation of landscape forms.