The galleries: New and old showcase country's finest

By T.J. McNAMARA

The Auckland Art Gallery hosts two strikingly different exhibitions that fulfil some of the grandest aspirations of art in New Zealand. In the New Gallery is an artist who has worked in New York and established an international reputation. In the older gallery on the other side of the road is a mid-career artist whose work in essence stems from his Maori heritage and is uniquely New Zealand.

Neither exhibition is easy to approach but both have been given space to breathe and look handsome on the big, white walls of the galleries. The work of Max Gimblett, born here but whose career as a painter began in New York in 1970, sits well in the wide spaces not only because of its scale but because each work functions as a separate, achieved presence.

The show is called The Brush of All Things and much of the work is characterised by the extraordinary power of a single, spontaneous brush stroke against a strictly geometrical, often sculptural shape. In one of the clearest statements in the dialogue between the artist and his wife which occupies part of the catalogue, the artist makes it clear the work is all gestural.

Although the remarkably energetic brush-strokes appear spontaneous they have been preceded by deep meditation.

The philosophy that is the foundation of this visual expression is founded in Zen Buddhism, notably in the Zen drawings of the Sengai, the 18th-century Japanese monk.

Coincidentally, it is almost 40 years since a wonderful exhibition of drawings by Sengai graced the Auckland Festival. In one powerful drawing his fresh, clear brushstrokes were allied to geometry.

With one gesture for each, he characterised the circle as a symbol of completeness, the triangle as aspiration upward and the square as all-compassing stability. Similar possibilities with the addition of emotional colour are part of the work of Gimblett.

Gimblett's work has other roots in antiquity as many of his paintings use the quatrefoil shape derived from four intersecting circles and often found in the mullions of Gothic windows.

The shape is used for its sheer elegance in a work in red and gold called Sky Gate, where fine gold curves suggest a multifoliate rose and a star.

This kind of work depicts nothing but suggests everything to the viewer prepared to give it time. The calm of Sky Gate is in contrast to another huge quatrefoil work that is full of paint and blood. Crucifixion is slashed by a burst of blood-red paint scarcely mitigated by a fertile green. Imposed on this is a cross with anguished twists and turns of black.

It is some relief to turn to the serenity of the works in pure colour or to the vivid assertions of tall columns against bright, clear light which deepen into solemnity in the blue-on-blue work called Awe.

These bars of colour are still gestures though they do not have the splash of the brush-stroke works. They are an assertion made by the artist on behalf of the viewer. They stand for all of us against the oppression of time and mortality and insist, "I exist, I am".

That this assertion is made in the face of death is exemplified in a group of works on paper that have not been seen here before.

They characterise the painter, wife and friends as bones and link with the death's head motif carved in shells that lie on the floor of one of the galleries.

This exhibition has a grandeur of concept and execution that is given to few shows.

Shane Cotton stands not with his face to the future but turned toward the past though firmly grounded in the present. His art uses modern images of gang patches and basketballs alongside images from painted Maori meeting-houses.

The paintings are careful compilations of detail, sometimes stacked like shelving, at other times floating in a warm darkness.

He has learned from Ralph Hotere how to make darkness signify warmth, dignity and richness although Cotton's darkness is a deep sepia and conveys an extra element of yearning.

It is early in a career to have a retrospective exhibition, yet Cotton has a sufficient body of work to make study of the changes well worthwhile.

The earliest work uses imagery from the meeting houses of the East Coast, most notably in Faith, where the plant in a pot symbolises something that has grown but does not have roots deep in the earth. The plant is stiffened and stylised and the lettering above it is insistent.

The style of the work is appropriated from a Hungarian Australian, Imants Tillers, who took it from the American Ed Ruscha.

The use of a branching form or some sort of scaffolding or stack is an important part of the early work although even a pincushion can be called into action as a place where stakeholders plant their standards.

These standards feature everywhere against the scrubbed background that gives an impressive unity to all the disparate images. The most potent image is a long horizon with a symmetrical mountain rising from it. The image's power arises, as it does in McCahon, from the light beyond the hill.

One of the most impressive paintings, Ruarangi, is a dark land, a cross and a bird that is the spirit in flight.

Much of the work contains long passages in Maori which the viewer is expected to be able to cope with. It is best just to pronounce it in your mind to get the effect of exclamation and chant as belief in the word is as important as image.

The force of this powerful exhibition culminates in six double paintings which have a large gallery to themselves. In these, the relics of the past are decorated with the patterns of the present.

One notable feature is a concentric arrangement of circles like a target. This is obviously an intellectual, geometric construct, counterpointed by the bright, beautifully painted image of the tui, posing natural grace against human construction.

It is remarkable that the circles are similar in feeling and colour to the big round paintings of Max Gimblett. At this point the journeys of two disparate but outstanding painters from Aotearoa coincide. The Auckland Art Gallery has provided a great moment in New Zealand art, which will last until August 8.