The galleries: Best bets for punters

By T.J. McNAMARA

If art were horse racing there would be some painters betting for a win, some for a place and some who would have a bet both ways.

The ones who bet for a win are the purists who put all their effort into one aspect of art.

Generally, they are the now-traditional abstract artists who load everything on to the play of shapes across a surface. They concentrate on shape and colour.

Such art is now academic and the work of Chris Heaphy at the Michael Lett Gallery in Karangahape Rd is an excellent example.

In the past Heaphy has made his art from a variety of materials but has now pared down his expression to triangular shapes painted with sharp-edged precision on a plain, dark background. The only way to speak about such art is in metaphor. These shapes dance, making neat movements as they fan across the surface. The way they meet, edge to edge and point to point, is piquant and tense. The colour is exceptionally interesting in that it is quite dull but so loaded as to have great intensity.

The segments, although not luminous, have a special quality of tone that links them in an inventive way to the colours alongside. The unusual shades of brown, blue and green meet in surprising ways and gain from each other.

In the best of the work the dancing metaphor continues to be suggested by the number of triangular forms that relate to the lower edge of the painting as if they were dancers on pointe.

The paintings have titles in Maori and relate to places.

The biggest painting has as a title the longest place-name in the world. The work has two panels. Across the top is a band of blazing red different from anything else in the show. Under this horizon is one of the turning forms and a number of independent triangles all poised in their pointe.

This is an extremely skilled exhibition of its rarefied kind that will appeal mainly to a specialist art audience.

Equally skilled and excellent, but of a totally different kind, is the work of Justin Boroughs at the John Leech Gallery, also until August 21.

It is a place bet in that it has several potentially winning ways. The quality of the painting is outstanding but it also has the appeal of taking as its subject scenes in Auckland and Hawke's Bay that are well known and picturesque.

Boroughs is a consummate technician. His drawing is immaculate - witness his boats, which have perceptible volume and sit weightily on the water. His control of light gives a lively unity to the paintings with their mass of detail.

His painterly talents and the interest of his subject matter come together beautifully when he depicts the old boatsheds near the Waterfront Rd.

These sheds have stood for a lifetime. And although most Aucklanders are familiar with them, Boroughs makes us see them anew. They all have green doors on the seaward side.

Time and the weather has made each set of doors a different shade of green. The artist captures these variations exactly in a small triumph of paint and colour.

The painting called Mt Hobson is notable for the delicate painting of the light in the sky above the hill as well as the surface of the water of the bay.

There is a second group of scenes in Hawke's Bay - Te Mata and the Tukituki River. These are painted with great diligence and skill but seem to lack the element of love apparent in the Auckland scenes.

It is a bet both ways when an artist combines geometrical abstraction with sharp realism. This combination is found at the Studio of Contemporary Art in Newmarket in Neal Palmer's exhibition On the Fence which runs until August 14.

He works on aluminium and paints foliage, flax, hibiscus and pohutukawa leaves with great attention to detail. Red pohutukawa leaves get special attention. Nibbled edges and black, fungal spots are precisely recorded.

All this takes place within geometric shapes, often overlaid by strong geometric abstract elements. In X Road Meeting, black chevrons drive into the painting over the top of the vegetation.

In Trellis Ribbons, silver and black diamonds are overlaid on the flax in the background. The device is very successful - the silver gives a lift to the surface and the interaction between the real and the contrived produces appreciable gains.

There is a fine, straight landscape included in the show. In other places the paintings are more playful. Some are done in a quatrefoil shape as a reference to the work of Max Gimblett. In Flax Max and Max Red the shape adopted from the older painter adds little.

A remarkable phenomenon of a young artist who really is on a winner and should not go unnoticed is Rozi Demant, whose first exhibition at the Warwick Henderson Gallery sold out immediately after opening. This show goes to auction tomorrow in an unprecedented way of establishing what value is placed on the work.

Her paintings create a special world of wide horizons within which melancholy, topless women in their lingerie stand on tall, insect legs clad in ballet slippers. They stilt their way across wide landscapes where only birds fly free.

Detailed, strange, awkward - they are unmistakable and involved in some Gothic, neurotic competition all their own. What becomes of them will be fascinating.