The galleries: Inspired by a neverending festival of art

By T.J. McNAMARA

There is a festival on in town - but in art there is always a festival in Auckland. What is your preference? The strength of stone, illumination, wit, messages, metaphors or myth? Maori or Pakeha tradition?

Where to begin? Khartoum Place, perhaps. Behind Fingers is FhE galleries where, until October 10, Chris Charteris is showing how splendidly he works stone.

It is easy in these days of power tools to cut and polish stone. It is easy to give it a curve and a twist and, because of its nature, it will probably look sculptural. What is much harder is to give it significant form with layers of meaning.

Charteris does this when he links obsidian and scoria and makes a vast, hanging necklace of them, creating a powerful ceremonial object. Even more impressively he takes pounamu, a piece far beyond jewellery size, and makes the stunning Wave Blade of it. The leading edge of the blade is transparent as only greenstone can be, the trailing edge is the white stone mixed with the green.

He takes basalt, leaves the flat natural sides on and polishes the edge so its buttress shape reflects the title, Kaha (Strength).

It is only when he is confronted with a really huge piece of greenstone shot with white that his inspiration falters and the stone is impressive only in its size rather than what has been made of it.

If you like dark, dramatically lit realism go next door to Oedipus Rex Gallery where, until October 4, an artist new on the scene, Daniel Unverricht, is throwing illumination on the bits and pieces of everyday, or overnight, life in small-town New Zealand. A lurid light makes a mystery of petrol stations, supermarkets and Great Cutz, the hairdresser. The exhibition alternates tiny paintings with medium-sized ones though the treatment of the subjects does not change with the scale.

An image of an empty boxing ring with folding chairs in the foreground is something American artists such as Edward Hopper or George Bellows might have been proud of and it certainly catches the flavour of the recreations and interests of part of New Zealand.

Recreation is part of the second exhibition at Oedipus, Carnivora by Angela Singer.

It is full of a wry wit. Typically, a carefully worked tapestry, elaborately framed, shows a stag, a "Monarch of the Glen" - conventional except that aimed right at the heart of the deer is a delicately embroidered gun-sight.

The show is not all ironic tapestries. There is a stuffed trophy head adorned with jewellery and, for better or worse, another work in which the form of a dead possum in wax is also laden with jewellery as befits something valued when dead. It is funny, strange and has some obscure message.

And then you might tramp right to the bottom of town where messages are the whole thing. John Reynolds' exhibition at Sue Crockford's Gallery until October 11 is of paintings of uniform size, each divided horizontally into two parts with each part painted in harmonising pastel colour. On these sweet surfaces Reynolds has written messages in silver paint which changes with the light and sometimes stands out or, at other times, sinks into the fields of colour.

In some of the works, at a loss for words, the artist has taken a silver line and pushed it round and round and back and forth as if hunting for meaning in a place where it is hard to find the way. These paintings are called Desert Road.

The paintings with writing play immensely clever visual games with the way the letter stands out or is lost against the colour so when it reads, "I'm Doing Nothing Wrong", the first part is neutral but the "wrong" stands out against a grey background like an assertion. Another painting says, "I'm immortal", bold and clear against a dark background and the following, "when I'm with you" dissolves into a pale, tender colour. Yet again the word "God" is placed in a deep, pale space, solemn and majestic; then in the lower part of the painting there is the odd little rubric, "made me funky".

To enjoy this show and to appreciate why Reynolds is among the Big Nine up at the New Gallery, you really have to surrender to his game and literary/visual interplay.

If you continue your artistic festive journey to Parnell to the Warwick Henderson Gallery you encounter good, conventional, atmospheric landscape painting by April Shin until September 28.

Her dark landscapes always have trees reflected in water and suggest Europe rather than home territory. There are no people and no structures, just trees, the wind and the clouds. The black trunks of the trees stiffen these works and give them compositional strength. The paintings are textured so there is a play of light over the surface but the texture comes from paper applied before the painting begins so it is only partly successful since it is unrelated to the form.

On the other side of Parnell Rd is a more colourful exhibition by Pauline Thompson until September 26. Her symbolic paintings of the four seasons conjure up the Garden of Eden. There is richness, sensuality and delight in these works. With their Polynesian context they are truly part of an Auckland festival.