The galleries: Curious imagery creates odd puzzles

By T.J. McNAMARA

A trek around some of Auckland's galleries produces the curious and the odd amid puzzling imagery from painters in four or five shows. At the Jensen Gallery until the first week in December, Tony Lane's paintings contain all the well-known elements of his style, knobs and necklaces in high relief, beautiful surfaces of rich, rubbed colour, gold and gilded borders, and luminous lighting around the edges of the images.

A curious new departure is the imagery of shoes. Not really shoes but what appear to be the lasts on which shoes are made. They have long, pointy medieval toes and spiked heels, are warmly coloured and set against a variety of backgrounds.

Some, within a tightly confining frame, are in a soft misty background. In another the shoes are set against a rich red and are linked to a bare tree that occupies the space and ovals of gold. Elsewhere, they are set against a background of pale mountains.

Shoe shapes in these settings are puzzling but more convincing than the high, narrow chairs that show in some other works, because shoes evoke human steps and progress of some sort.

The varied coloured shoes associated with the tree on the red surface suggest individuals, all different yet all related. This is only one metaphorical interpretation. There are evocations of "following in footsteps" and "steps to the stars".

It is typical of Lane's style that at the centre of the painting he focuses on the trunk of the tree and frames it in a special frame of relief elements, making it the origin of species. In another work we think of treading on the mountains and these may be the mountains of the memory.

Whatever the viewer's response, most will surely be entranced by the extraordinarily delicate surfaces and the luminosity of the paint. Each painting is a curiosity but undeniably rich and decorative.

At the Ivan Anthony Gallery in Karangahape Rd is even more oddity but not the same richness of effect. Tony de Lautour is showing his work there until November 22. His dry paintings are done against a black background and feature a lot of little detail done with the point of the brush.

Bones, broken bottles and flasks spilling blood, as well as numerals such as surveyors' notations, feature in most of these astringent paintings. The curiosities are the symbols, lions with human faces and the unicorn of the nation's coat of arms treading in a dirt tray which resembles something used to train the cat.

Planes made of mountains, kiwi and arrows and double-headed eagles with a heart all play their odd parts. It is sad and satirical. What is it all about? Perhaps the nearest thing to a statement rather than a puzzle is the painting in the gallery's foyer. On a raft of wooden boards that looks like a picnic table there is a weighty pedestal surmounted by a heavy cross.

Around this lie littered bones and bottles; the weight of tradition, religion and all things monumental sit like a weight on the poor raft in the Southern Ocean.

It is an awkward, even clumsy expression of a point of view. Some hint of celebration would have been warmer.

At G2FhE in Kitchener St, Marissa Bradley is showing Wonder until November 28. Her individual works are quaint, surrealist things. One of the best is Curious.

Bradley works in dense, shiny, enamel-like paint on pieces and planks of recycled kauri and the effect is of tablets, curiosities from the past. On the kauri she paints tables, curtains, chandeliers, books and trees. Moths symbolise the fluttering spirit. They are strange and dreamlike but delicate, and the nostalgic effect is heightened by old-fashioned spindly lettering.

At the Milford Galleries until November 24 is Joanna Braithwaite's Wild Things (see story B7). The considerable reputation of this artist is based on oddity and strangeness. In the past, her work has been closely worked, dense landscapes and sea-scapes where things as ordinary as cabbage trees, cows and birds have taken on an oddity. Her previous exhibitions have usually been no more than half a dozen paintings. This is a copious show but the painting no longer covers the full canvas.

Her Wild Things are curiosities against a dark background and are composite creatures - a bird with a stag's head, and vice versa, a sheep-dog that is half-sheep and half-dog joined at the belly, an egg-man and a swan-woman where the swan-woman reverses the Leda and the Swan situation.

Weird and difficult to forget, these creatures seem like studies for a painting by Hieronymous Bosch but nowhere are the elements pulled together into a portrayal of a nightmare world that would parallel the real world and be a comment on it. They remain isolated oddities.