Art: Potshot at the critic part of the serious game of looking

By T.J. McNAMARA

You've got to join in. In the art game the viewer must participate imaginatively and emotionally if the game is to be played properly.

Sometimes the game is deadly serious as it is at the Oedipus Rex Gallery where Star Gossage is showing her new work. The viewer must participate in these paintings by imaginatively entering into a world of myth where women are part of the landscape that gave them birth.

These women do not resemble the landscape as they often do in sculpture but they have an intense unity with the land shown by the way the works are painted as much as by the imagery.

When you enter into the mind of these women you are not entering into a comfortable world but a place of tension and stress. This can be seen in the eyes of faces in such works as, How Do I Quiet My Heart.

This is a world of myth and ritual that recalls the work of Australian painters such as Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd. The Australians, however, used predominantly the red and brown colours of their landscape. These paintings have much of the sombre New Zealand shades of green.

In a painting such as O Rangimarie, the elements of woman, a pool and the offering of a tiki combine to suggest the spirit in the land. The tensions of the spirit are evident in Purerehua where bare trees take on the quality of gallows and suggest the damage of the past.

There is another game played by the same artist which has different rules and is slighter by comparison. This game is taking old fence posts and making them totems both male and female. It is a dead-end game.

There is another game in which the viewer can take part. This is the game where the viewer participates in the decisions about where touches of colour shall be placed and what shape is to be balanced against another.

The sort of brushwork that allows this imaginative participation is evident in the work of Nancy Synnesvedt at the Chiaroscuro Gallery.

There is more to this game than formal decisions. You can also join in the decisions about which colour will convey feeling. So you can feel the decision to make the colour what it is in a painting called Blue and you can see that the painter has let the colour run as if weeping.

In the whole series of abstract paintings called Love Medicine you can see that the red of passion is placed against the purple of pleasure but again in these paintings the drips run down and there will be tears before bedtime.

The drawback is that when you take the time to participate fully in one painting, if the next is very similar, you can quickly tire of the game.

Yet this is the drawback of any coherent exhibition. Here there is some variety provided by an attractive, dexterous conventional painting of South Island - Spring.

Then there are the big games. The recent painting by Australian artist Dale Frank at the Gow Langsford Gallery are very big indeed and the painter has a big reputation. This game is not only big but elaborate. Most of the paintings have a long title that, in the best modern manner, is an internet address. Also in the best modern manner they celebrate celebrities. Again in the best modern manner, they celebrate big male celebrities in the nude though you would have to look hard to find any bits.

The nude painting in magenta that is linked to www.leonardodicaprio or the black and blue that is linked with www.johnnydepp are tied to these people only by the suggestions of the colour. You have to work it out.

The paintings are made by floating acrylic resin around on a surface until there are hills and dales and some misty forms. The acrylic is then coated with varnish to give a highly polished finish.

The technique works best in the dark, looming form and considerable presence of Merrick Hunt.

The biggest paintings in the show are in a quite different style but are equally insouciant and witty. One, hidden away in the gallery office is called The Artist's Three Testicles on the Rotisserie of Life. On the right it has red flames and there are three forms in the middle with fertile green centres.

But in the art game critics are fair game. The biggest painting of all is one where a formal geometric pattern on the left evolves into a colourful squawk which squirts across the painting into the wild blue yonder. This lively painting is a warning to all who play hunt the symbol. It is called The Painting for the Pompous Critic Duck Who Spoke Gobbledygook through his Duck Liver Pate Arse on Sex and the Incontinence of his Reality.

Finally there are games of infinite subtlety and sophistication. Art games where the work consists of polishing a section of gallery wall to make a rectangle which is slightly different in texture from the rest of the surface.

This is a work done by Karen Sander in a show called Six Degrees of Separation at the Jensen Gallery.

In other work Imi Knoebel makes the frame the painting and Gunter Umble makes a plain surface standing proud of the wall suggest both a thrust forward and deep space. This is a game for connoisseurs.