The galleries: Smart words and signs of contrast

By TJ McNAMARA

"What do you read, my lord?" "Words, words, words," answered Hamlet. A critic is no Hamlet but he might well make the same answer to some querulous Polonius asking about this week's art.

The smart words are at the Michael Lett Gallery in Karangahape Rd where recent graduate Matt Ellwood uses slogans from cigarette ads to add both whimsy and irony to autobiographical photographs as an accompaniment to his ultramodern, polished toy sculptures. The purpose of the long line of baby photographs is less clear.

The best work is a robot strangling a rabbit but whether we can read it as "a collision between contemporary ideology and post-structural psychology when filtered through toy merchandising", as the gallery handout suggests, is problematical. The exhibition has two weeks to run.

The principal show this week is by John Reynolds at the Sue Crockford Gallery until June 26. In the centre of the gallery is a large blackboard lettered with words from Einstein. The blackboard is a relic from an old schoolroom and on its reverse side is a grubby screen. The screen is lettered with an ill-spelt rave by Kurt Cobain. The whole is called Einstein Sings Nirvana.

It is instructive in its contrast, much in the way the German artist Joseph Beuys used blackboards. Reynolds' work has always been about signs and the words in his blackboard piece signify the contrast between the high and the popular.

The ambiguities he plays with are emphasised by a work in neon which glows in the windows of the gallery. It is called Pretty Ugly and the contradiction in the expression is underlined by making "pretty" an attractive colour and "ugly" appropriately unpleasant. Again contrast by signs.

All this word play is reinforced by a group of dozens of little paintings, each 10cm x 10cm, all of which have a name or saying lettered on them. Each one is laid out so as to give a small frisson of emphasis.

Even these tiny paintings are ambiguous because the lettering is done in paint that from some angles glitters with life and at others fades into the background.

Paradoxically, the paintings that are all words have less meaning and impact than the abstract paintings in the show that refer only obliquely to texts.

There are three fine paintings, each with the title, The Pathology of Sorrowful Songs. It is intended surely that these works are an echo of such sad lyrics as found in Gorecki's Symphony No 3 - Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.

These impressive paintings are an examination of such songs. Above, and sometimes below, a stable horizon are intricate spiral forms, typical of Reynolds' mark-making.

These are an endlessly cycling echo of something past. Not only are these forms remarkable in themselves but the colour also reinforces the image and gives much more to the imagination of the viewer than the direct lettering of ideas.

They work on both a larger and a smaller scale and are evidence of Reynolds' continuing capacity for strong visual invention.

Are words any use in a painting if they cannot be read? In her exhibition called Thoughts, at the Judith Anderson Gallery until June 25, Jude Nye buries her words beneath fascinating surfaces that are misty or stony and sometimes interrupted by bold splashes of white.

In painting after painting we are aware of inscriptions but only here and there can we read the words. When we can, they still remain enigmatic - phrases such as "the sentient twig". The process could reduce the lettering to a purely decorative element but just enough is clear, combined with other signifiers such as a ladder, to hint at progress, change and mediation.

The surfaces in the best of these works suggest the processes of time and memory in such a way that the fading letters become a metaphor for loss, prophecy, and fractured communication. The grey painting It Goes Without Saying is typical of the inventive and complex surface the painter can create. It has a hint of wonder that is lost in the haze of other works. The show makes an assured and purposeful debut.

Around the corner at FhE gallery is Brilliant Shadow by Sarah Guppy until June 30. This unpretentious exhibition has been inspired by a poem by St Thomas Aquinas beginning, "All things desire to be like God". Accordingly, these little works are full of colour and have an elusive movement upward, typically in Let Go of Attachment.

The paintings are enamel on glass and here and there little texts are collaged on to the surface. They give an autobiographical link to the images when they say, "Numbers are to me of all things most elusive" or "Love, like happiness, is a moment-to-moment state".

These are pleasant words but the real charm of the work lies in the honeyed colour counterpointed by shadow that allows their sense of celebration to emerge from a serious, thoughtful base.