The galleries: Spirit-lifting work offers excitement by the yard

By T.J. McNAMARA

Sir Kenneth Clark demanded of art that it should do more than just give pleasure. He thought that it should relate to life by increasing our energy of spirit.

In the week before Easter there were more than 20 substantial exhibitions that continue in and around the central city as well as the Triennial. How do some of these refresh and expand our spiritual energy? There are many different ways.

At the Gow Langsford Gallery until May 1, the work of Judy Miller, who has an extensive reputation here and abroad, gives us energy by swoops of dark paint accompanied by astringent colour laid on in patches or bands that stretch from side to side of the painting.

Their energy comes from their size and ambition. What would be as purely decorative as wrapping paper on a small scale becomes a spirit-lifting, exciting endeavour on the scale of her biggest works, where we have a sense of physical participation in their making.

For all that, the way they wrap around the edge of the work gives the sensation that they have been made and can be cut off by the yard.

The painter struggles against this feeling in three smaller works confined by a frame. These untitled works turn in on themselves and are complete within the outlines of the frame.

One is pulled together by a triangle. In another the loops turn at the edge of the work, while the third turns inward on itself continually.

Only one of them really succeeds - the one with the loops - but they show the painter's continual evolution and struggle, which is in itself an aspect of energy.

The intricate yet bold flying shapes done with mops or even with fingers are black, over large, flat areas of colour, mostly green and red.

Again there is a gain of intensity when the colour is concentrated and unifies the whole in the way that No 8 untitled focuses on a rich red rather than the arbitrary sour green and red in a typical work such as No 11.

To move to the adjoining John Leech Gallery where a collection of the work of the late Tony Fomison has been assembled is to move from an energy of sensation to an energy of vision.

It is a grim vision. Fomison's work has an unmistakable power, and the power lies in both mystery and authority.

The first of his dark paintings in the show is Tohunga, done in 1974, which is a solemn head where strong, rhythmic forms and deep-set eyes bring it close to an idol.

The authority of idols is also conferred on three ages of women in HISSTORY redrawn as HERSTORY with its female Laocoon entrammelled by snakes and its grotesque Pinocchio figures of men.

Fomison did not always need elaborate drawing to convey the spirit at the heart of things. There is one golden painting that contrasts with his prevailing browns, called Roads out to the Coast. A glimpse of sea, hills and a winding road and something strange in the foreground have a metaphorical power that is unique to Fomison.

Not all the work is at this high level of suggestion, but the exhibition is a potent reminder of Fomison's sway over New Zealand landscape and myth. Until May 1.

Across Khartoum Place at Oedipus Rex Gallery until April 30, Mal Bouzaid is showing her seascape paintings. They are called Light on Water and the energy in these paintings comes almost entirely from the colour.

The paintings are monochrome, although in some of the best of them the surface colour is scraped away to give a hint of contrasting underpainting. The other thing that energises the work is horizontal ripples of texture which give the merest hint of the movement of waves.

The titles tell how the paintings should be approached, so that Into the Deep is an intense blue, Breathing Sea a pale blue, and Open Water a pale green.

The colour is moody and evocative, but relying on a single colour puts these paintings on a knife-edge so that Mud Flats and Skimmer, which use grey and mauve respectively, do not have the same sea mystery as elsewhere.

The energy that comes from mysterious haze is exploited beautifully by Kathy Barber at the Milford Galleries. Here the paintings are all called Landforms. The shadowy difference between the light and the sky and the dark forms of the land provides the tension that gives these works a sense of vision of a spiritual element, based on realism but extending far beyond it.

The colours are severely subdued, but in the best of them, like No 6, there is an added element such as a vertical fall which adds notes of grace to the predominant horizontals. Until April 19.

Barber's work is at the soft end of the expression of energy. Up at the Bath Street Gallery in Parnell, Wayne Seyb is at the opposite pole. Thick paint is plastered on to convey landscapes, waves, skies and stars. The colour is bright to the point of bombast.

The straight landscape painting is supplemented by a couple of big symbolic paintings. One uses a boat and sunflowers as symbols of voyaging and van Gogh, and the other, the best piece in the show because it is the most considered, takes its title from a refrain of a great poem by Lorca.

At Five in the Afternoon refers to the death of a bullfighter. In the painting there are more than 100 faces of the heroic dead and little maps of their circumstances. It is not a comfortable painting but it has a strong degree of spiritual energy.

In complete contrast, the exhibition is rounded off by little enamel plaques, all graced by Angels of Annunciation taken from Renaissance paintings. Mary Barker shows that you do not have to be wild to have energy. Both until May 1.