The galleries: Virtues of verve and precision

Detail from Michael Hight's White Sow Valley. Behind the stillness lies the suggestion of life going on.

Dash or detail is a basic artistic decision. The epitome of dash is Australian artist Dale Frank, whose work is at the Gow Langsford Gallery until July 29.

His vivid, dense chemical colours mixed with resin are dripped on to large canvases laid horizontal. The canvas is then tilted to make the colours flow in a variety of directions.

Mostly these flows of colour are thick and unvaried, notably in the almost monochrome, Jos Heder, which has two waves of an exceptionally rich maroon.

Other paintings are much more complex but each has an individuality established by the range and extraordinary combinations of colour.

In these works the colour is not always unmixed. By a variety of mysterious methods, Frank incorporates sweeping swathes of colour and mixed areas where two colours interact after being kept separate by resist techniques.

The exuberant energy of these grand exercises is reflected in their exceptionally long titles - far too long to be quoted here - that suggest a variety of events and meetings.

The titles struggle to impose some sense of narrative upon chance effects. These can be read in painterly events with the canvas and there is an impressive richness in these combinings and clashes.

One suspects there must be a lot of discarded paintings where the technique has failed to produce the layered and interwoven, yet spontaneous, quality of the paintings but these examples done with such verve make a convincing case for dash.

Next door at the John Leech Gallery is work at the opposite end of the style spectrum.

Michael Hight, whose new paintings are on show also until July 29, gives precise detail of texture, shape, structure, rock, vegetation, landscape and sky.

The region he chooses to give such painstaking realisation to is around the Maniototo in the South Island and the subjects are stacks of beehives.

Sometimes the hives are painted in close-up with careful attention to their weathered text.

This makes for paintings that are almost abstract. Then there are the panoramas where the hives are guarded behind barbed wire in a landscape of distant mountains, winter-bare trees and rocky outcrops. The paintings are exact but diffident in the use of colour.

Muted brown is predominant to the point of mannerism.

These are not exuberant paintings but work that makes a virtue of precision.

Yet for all their realistic detail there is a subtle suggestion of life within the hives, a hint of activity in this bare country.

The initial appeal may be in the attractive detail, like the dovetailing of the boxes in Taieri, but there is a pervading sense of something more happening within the outward manifestations, as well as a sense of menace in rock and barbed wire.

The high landscape is depicted in a way that suggests sympathy and knowledge.

Hight has mined the same lode as he has done in his last exhibitions but he does find further deposits of rich ore.

That the absence of detail does not preclude a sense of grandeur is amply demonstrated by the big paintings of Garry Currin, at Milford Galleries until July 22.

The wash and sweep of the sea is his subject matter, evoked as spray and mist flooded in light through which headlands and even ships labouring in heavy seas are dimly perceived. The fall of light and misty atmosphere gives these works a visionary quality, hence the show's title, Quotation of Dream.

Some experimental work, such as Old Language, contains a picture within the picture against a dark background and is an exercise in virtuosity.

Much more successful is the magnificent, orange-red After Zeus, where the receding light and flashes of gold suggest the passing of the god.

Remarkably, the splendid large paintings, which must be viewed from a distance, are complemented by small, monochrome grey works.

These are more explicit as to place and close up, the feeling is emphasised by details, such as the tiny rectangle of white that is the only hint of human habitation in a whirl of sea and rocky shore in the particularly fine Quotation of Dreams III.