T J McNamara: Peephole to infinity

At the Auckland Art Gallery there is a work on display by the prominent British sculptor Anish Kapoor, who is responsible for the largest sculpture in Europe at the Tate Modern. The work in the show, Aperture, is absolutely simple, a cabinet with a blue interior. The blue is so deep and intense it seems to go on forever. To look into the cabinet is to look into infinity.

Simplicity and poise are classical virtues and there is nothing more simple in contemporary art than minimal abstraction. It is the logical extreme of abstract art.

The work of Chris Heaphy at the Michael Lett Gallery in Karangahape Rd until August 23 has the basic requirement for effective minimalism. It is large in scale and architectural in feeling.

The principal works are made up of two panels in black, each containing a column of light within the dark field. The dark surfaces are beautifully created with a considerable density; the paintings are neatly made with the corner of the contrasting edge, a junction where such paintings often fall down, exceptionally well handled.

What are we to make of these big paintings with their columns of light? When the column extends to the full height of the canvas it becomes a space and gives a feeling of depth. When it extends only two-thirds of the way up the canvas it becomes a column, and the top of the canvas becomes a weight or lintel.

This effect is emphasised by the way the top part of these canvases is, perhaps because of the need to make edges so precise, a fine line that subtly separates a faintly different texture from the major areas of darkness.

The whole system is at its most effective in Essence and Delivery. The canvas on the left divides precisely into two weighty blocks while that on the right gives a strong sense of support and upward thrust. In Fanfare and Doubt there is a flourish of light on the left; on the right, two columns support a black area that exerts downward pressure oppressively.

In the single-panel canvases, Virtue lifts upward and Suspense hovers in a void.

The days of such simplicity might well be thought to have departed with the New York School, but in the right setting, on the right wide, white wall, supporting the right architecture, these paintings would be strong and continue to provoke thought, especially about visual effect and harmony.

The wall sculpture of Robert Bourdon at the Milford Galleries in Kitchener St until the end of the month is simple in outline but complicated in texture, colour and suggestion.

The best of them have a basic fish-hook shape, although it is a blunt hook. This archetypal shape is used in a work called The Green Rose, where the loop and a delicately ribbed surface works very well. Surface qualities are both fascinating and mysterious in Black Hook, which also gets its energy from a twisted loop.

Other works in this confident and inventive show include a ribbed vortex called Charybdis and a work called In the Beginning which has a void in the middle of a petal-like structure. Both of these works suffer from dissonant, awkward colour. The one piece that is on the floor, a fine rocking form with a spire called Under Pressure, avoids the colour problem by leaving the marks of its creation obvious and raw.

Bourdon is a highly competent, inventive sculptor who works through ideas and mostly achieves simple, strong, satisfying results.

The work of prominent New Plymouth artist Terry Urbahn at the Anna Bibby Gallery (2 Morgan St, Newmarket) until the end of the month is far from simple. But we are aided in our understanding by a lavish catalogue. A baffled critic can do no more than quote from the catalogue and hope it will clarify the work.

We are told "the arts" are "where contemporary art meets opera, ballet, choral societies, theatre, ceramics and quality movies", and "it is an insistently bourgeois domain favoured by upwardly mobile farmers' wives, Remuera matrons and wine sponsors".

We are told Urbahn's work is designed to "wreck this serenity" and be "an aesthetically grating experience". We are told the works are "full of layered cynicism" and it incorporates, like previous work by Urbahn, a television screen so we can see "our-sad-arsed-sidewalk-selves" with "nothing better to do than watch". His "inept television" is designed to "jolt the genteel audience" and he triumphantly "throws away the banana and eats the skin".

That Urbahn is an intelligent artist with a fine line in subversive comment was exemplified by his 1997 show of discarded museum cases called Realist. The present show of slopped plaster, matchsticks, candles, marbles and photographs does not, despite the catalogue, come within cooee of his previous achievement.

It is inventive, strange, odd and subversive but because it is so deliberately ramshackle it is unconvincing. Yet we should be grateful for the introduction of the term "Taranaki gothic".