The galleries: Bring your own reality

By T.J. McNAMARA

Art is on an arch between the spirit and reality, the abstract and the real. The title of Geoff Thornley's exhibition The Voice of Mimesis at the Vavasour/Godkin Gallery (35 High St, until September 20) places emphasis on the fact it is an imitation, a mime, a copy of reality, yet it is filled with spirit and viewers must bring their own reality.

The reality is the lovely glazed surfaces rich with mists of colour, never on the surface but always behind it. The deeper reality is the veins that throb beneath the surfaces will suggest patterns of life.

This is particularly marked in the red paintings where the colour inescapably leads to thoughts of the pulse of blood beneath the flesh. The more pale works, where the veining is darker, suggest the patterns of landscape and the growth of plant life as well as cloudy skies.

The effect of the layering, the mysterious traces of shadows and the subtle modulations of colour make these much more than conventional colour field painting. The paintings themselves are a lovely reality but there is an underlying spirit that suggests a deeper reality.

Like a lot of important art, they have carrying power at a distance as deep colour fields. Close to, they also work because of their shifting depths, although they do not easily reveal how the painter achieved his remarkable effects.

Exhibitions by Thornley are rare but they are an important reminder of his long career. The power of his thinking and making bring a rich spirit to an abstract idiom that in other hands is often purely decorative.

What is evident in a close examination of the paintings of Richard McWhannell at the John Leech Gallery (Khartoum Place until September 20) is not mysterious technique but a highly developed skill in finding an equivalent in paint for a reality in front of the eye.

The subject is immediate. Most of the works are portraits of a woman called Renee. She is important, but the quality of the paint adjusted within McWhannell's small, subdued range of colour, his observation of light and structure is just as important.

Immediately on entering the gallery you are confronted with a striking portrait of Renee. It is a portrait of the back of her head.

McWhannell has, like painters as diverse as Rubens and Constable, found on the range of the shoulders, the column of the neck and the coil of hair on the back of the head a fascinating subject to express in paint and has succeeded splendidly.

The light, from a source at the right, falls on the neck and emphasises its structure. The translucency of the ear, dry-brushed paint expressing the intricacy of hairstyle, broader areas of paint conveying the mass of the back and the little pinging touches that describe the earrings all make a small, albeit unfashionable, triumph of painting.

There is more. There is a painting of Renee exercising on a yoga platform where the whole figure is very freshly conveyed and another that features a black evening dress where the haunches of the figure are thrust toward us in a shape as powerfully expressive of the feminine as any painting by Paula Rego, whose style it remotely resembles.

Curiously, the self-portraits are less successful. They are self-deprecating and diffident and the paint itself loses its quality along with solidity and strength. Self-portrait at 50 is odd and thin and that is not just the trousers. The energy is restored when there is a challenge to a painterly problem such as light through a venetian blind.

The exhibition is completed by a huge, life-sized figure of Renee carved in totara. There is some awkwardness about the dress and the nose seen from the front, but the profile of the face with a hint of a smile at the corner of the mouth is very sensitive indeed. It is an impressive presence where McWhannell conveys the spirit of the character while maintaining direct contact with reality.

Then there is the reality of actual three-dimensional things. In the exhibition by Ani O'Neil at the Sue Crockford Gallery (2 Queen St, until September 13), the things are octopuses. Saucer-size, they crawl all over the walls of the gallery knitted in wool in a multiplicity of combinations of colour, all with eight dancing legs like animated tea-cosies. The octopus plays a central part in Pacific creation mythology.

In the centre of the floor, not saucer-sized but huge, is Eke Nui, the granddaddy of them all. This is a vast piece of knitting done in thick thread with the eight legs draping in all directions and a great unblinking eye. It has a powerful presence both as a simulation of the creature and because of the intricacy of the knitting. The dancing little creatures that populate the walls with their waving arms have more than a hint of twee craft work but the huge mythological beast in the middle of the gallery, so obviously related in form and concept to the small works, gives the whole show weight and portentousness.

The show, as an installation of these sea creatures at once lyrical and three-dimensionally real, conveys the spirit and force of Pacific mythology.