The galleries: Strength and honesty

By T.J. McNAMARA

Sentimentality was a mortal sin in 20th-century art and continues to be. We are still wary of gush or saccharine emotion.

Three strong exhibitions this week gain their power by avoiding sentiment.

At the Auckland Art Gallery is a small retrospective of the work of Robin White, curated by the Hocken Library of Dunedin. Island Life runs until February. It is accessible only in combination with Flaunt, the other major show at the gallery.

It deals with parents, relationships, loved landscapes and life in Polynesia. All are areas where there is real danger of slipping into sweetness without light.

White's reputation was made in the 1970s, with her hard-edged images often symmetrically arranged and painted with a smooth surface that carried over easily into screen prints. The severity of her compositions can be seen as early as 1971 where a flat, linear-edged suburban house is backed by the terraces of Mt Eden.

Her screen prints developed in the direction of making iconic tight images. The ordinary subject matter is organised into blocks as in the truck and house that feature in Mangaweka and the fish shop in Maketu.

The final development of these prints includes emblematic images of the Buzzy Bee as the symbol of New Zealand childhood and concrete houses as the epitome of New Zealand housing. The most notable of these solid houses is Fortress, which has a diagonal path, a heavy house and splendid hills behind. The hills that most attracted the artist were strong symmetrical shapes such as Harbour Cone, which features in many of the images she made when living in Dunedin. Nothing in any of these prints is cosy but it is always almost painfully honest.

The honesty and severe lack of sentimentality is particularly emphasised when the prints and oil paintings include people. The oil of Sam Hunt at Bottle Creek puts him ginger, brooding and touchy in the middle of patterns of vegetation. When she paints her mother, the image is of a woman bowed down by hard work, of a thin mouth made severe by the vicissitudes of life, of hands held in the lap, used to hard work and washing, equally exemplified in the apron and immaculately trim clothing.

When, following the demands of her faith, White went to Kiribati, the Polynesians who feature in the woodcuts she made there are not the dusky maidens of tourist postcards but strong people who nevertheless have problems: self-destruction through alcohol in The Fisherman Loses His Way, adolescent hysteria in Nei Tieni Goes for a Walk. This sequence is sharp and very touching and ends in an image of freedom and self-knowledge that is true and without exaggeration.

The most impressive image in the show is a woodcut, Self-Portrait with Conrad and Sea-shells, done in 1985. In this the artist sits in a meditative pose that makes a triangle of her body and gives weight and seriousness. In front of her is her naked child and below him a decoration of tropical shells. It could so easily be sentimental but it is stringent, solemn and totally honest.

White has a secure place in the history of art in New Zealand.

Gardens produce vast amounts of sentimental gush but Caroline Rothwell's astonishing work at the Gus Fisher Gallery in 74 Shortland St avoids sentiment by mostly concentrating her writhing plant forms on weeds. Called Elsewhere, the show runs until December 17.

In the lobby of the gallery the forms are conveyed by a line that zooms all over the walls, dives into corners and niches and takes flight as if blown by a powerful wind. The extraordinary quality of this varied line is due to its being made of signwriter's sticky vinyl applied to the wall.

The installation in the lobby is called Wonderland and next door in Gallery One is a series of hangings called Weed Garden. These images use the coloured vinyl strip on a transparent surface. The weeds are hugely enlarged and their growth patterns as well as their root systems make fascinating, unpredictable patterns and the transparent medium also allows a play of light on the wall behind.

The works are charged with great energy and it is easy to extrapolate from this, as the little catalogue does, to the energetic growth of weeds and the spread of introduced species and even to the relationship between here and Europe.

This handcrafted insight into growth forms is almost powerful enough to bear all this metaphoric extension of meaning.

Severity of another kind is apparent in the black tree made of PVC which goes floor to ceiling in Gallery Two.

The bulging, bosomy size of this tree and the rampant weediness are two aspects of unsentimentality, but there is a certain yielding to twee emotion in the little moulded forms that occupy the centre of the lobby floor.

It is also easy to be sentimental about Katherine Mansfield and her stories - and New Zealanders often are, although the writer was pretty tough-minded. It is good to see the exhibition of paintings by Susan Wilson, which were used as illustrations for a Folio Edition of Mansfield stories, are astringent rather than sweet. The paintings are on show at Jonathan Grant Galleries in Parnell until November 21.

A strange aspect of the work is that most of the paintings contain quotations or appropriations from other painters. In the artist's mind the imagery used by Mansfield must be as strong in literature as the visual images of van Gogh, Goya, Caravaggio, Lowry or even Alfred Wallis, the naive painter. It works well especially when Wallis' naive vision is the equivalent of the child's view of the Picton Ferry.