The galleries: Baffling blobs and kumara characters

By T.J. McNAMARA

Blobs are the thing this week: great green and grey plastic blobs. And kumaras, of all vegetables the most blob-shaped.

Fascinating, sardonic, repellent blobs are made by Peter Robinson in a show called Neo Conceptual Primitivism at the Anna Bibby Gallery in Newmarket until March 20.

Robinson, a big, powerful man, has always been an exponent of the sock-it-to-them, in-ya-face, up-yours-mate school of expressionist art.

Former manifestations of his vigorous manner were paintings that gave his opinions in black and white, condemned most New Zealanders as fascist and yet managed to cobble bits of German into the extensive writing on them. His revolutionary energies ensured that he was chosen to represent New Zealand at the famous Venice Biennale.

There, he turned towards sculpture and adopted a shape that involved two globes, one of which was equipped with a spike that penetrated the other.

For an exhibition at Artspace he created a green blob smoking a cigarette.

Large versions of these two blobby concepts make up this exhibition. They are funny, strange and so awful that they make an impression by their sheer vulgarity.

The larger work, sitting on the floor though equipped with rubber mats as wings, is called Fag Time I. Two large blobs are covered with grey foam material that gives them a moon-landscape surface.

Above them is a single eye staring resolutely forward. Behind these alien blobs there are three elongated trails resembling spew, sperm and spit.

"Ah!" says the aesthetic purist. "Perceive how cleverly the textures are varied. How exciting their contrast of smooth, irregular and spreading textures! And, oh, do perceive the fascinating surface of the major forms!"

Unconvincing. They remain resolutely turgid.

Undeniably, this thing is different. Nobody else here does anything quite like it. But does it mean anything beyond itself?

There appears to be more social comment in Fag Time II, which is like a dreadful alien in green who has taken up smoking. The shape also evokes couch potatoes. Again it has only one eye.

Perhaps it is a biased Irish couch-potato rugby fan.

The form supports a white stick, and from this arises a plume of spreading, irregular yellow foam. Its shapes look more like viscera than smoke, but it does give a rocking, suspended tension to the whole thing.

The effect is only from the front. If you walk around the work, as you are supposed to do with sculpture, the metal supporting this feature is clearly apparent. There is no magic or mystery in the making when you look from the back.

The exhibition is completed by an inconsequential photograph and, in the window, by an applique work in coloured felt with more eye shapes and a prominent red bowel.

Attractiveness is not for Robinson. Impact is all. It has pushed him to the top of the art pile in New Zealand. Many admire his work but it is really hard to like.

The exhibition is accompanied by sculpture by Seung Yul Oh. He makes grey elephants that look like concrete blocks. Occasionally they feebly flap their ears and baa like sheep. It is hard to see the point.

Kumara are a big blobby shape and blushing red to boot. Young artist Hamish Palmer is making a career of photographing kumara as characters. His show at the Oedipus Rex Gallery is called Emil Busmunt and the Museum of Magnanimus Root and runs until March 12.

He selects kumara that have a little crease in them that might be a smile, puts two beady eyes near the end, sticks them in natural situations and, remarkably, the kumara come across as extraordinary characters.

It is no great art but it is very amusing.

It is not uniformly successful. The show is unnecessarily dressed up with a corrugated iron shed, and when the kumara are made into historic personages with clothes it is pushing an amusing idea too far. Yet as blobs go it is lively, skilful and cleverly contrived.

The same sense of formula prevails in the work of Lyn Berquist, also at Oedipus. His neat blue landscapes and seascapes are woven into a framework of dry branches.

This is not just rustic framing: such sticks cunningly lashed together as these are provided maps of land and sea to guide Polynesian travellers.

Each ensemble has the carefully crafted, handsome quality usual in this artist's work.

The much more conventional paintings by Simon Payton at the Warwick Henderson Gallery until Saturday might appear formulaic too, but these works are a departure for an artist who has always shown colourful work, often rigged with boating detail but always with clear reference to particular places, especially the bays of the Auckland waterfront.

The latest work is a big step forward. It is called Random Spaces, and viewers are given much more room to use their imaginations.

On wide, vividly coloured beaches, tiny isolated figures cast shadows. There are bands of contrasting colour top and bottom. These have been scraped, gouged and combed to give them more excitement as surface.

Payton cannot completely abandon his naturalist painting. There are little inserts of realistic scenes. When colour establishes a strong mood, these paintings give a real sense of accomplishment.