TJ McNamara: Head rolls for human nature

Simplicity and exuberance can both be powerful. We are singularly fortunate this week to have an exhibition of extreme simplicity of concept and another that is so crowded with invention some of the work runs on wheels.

Both have remarkable presence and are the result of a high degree of skill.

Yet both the simple and the extravagant have that disturbing quality that sharpens the reaction and makes art rise above the commonplace.

At the Jensen Gallery in Upper Queen St, until June 20, Tony Oursler, the prominent mid-career American artist, is showing three of his works which use modern technology.

The works are recorded on DVD and projected on to fibreglass or plexiglass. They incorporate sound and movement. Most work involving recording and projection have some sort of narrative but these works do not tell stories.

They are independent objects, autonomous works of art. The most powerful is a fibreglass head lying on the floor, called Incubator.

Projected on to the fibreglass is a face which is not so much on the shape as in it. The face is horizontal. Cheek and jowl are on the ground. The shadows of the face are blue.

The teeth and eyeballs are yellow but the effect is startlingly realistic. It evokes all those accounts of how consciousness remains briefly in guillotined heads. This pathetic, even tragic severed head pleads with viewers and begs them not to go away, to pay attention, not to leave it alone, to care. It gains attention because it is a symbol of the human condition. "I could be anyone," it cries.

The head on the floor is an extraordinary and disturbing object. It is so demanding it makes most art trivial by comparison, but you could not have it at home.

This is not domestic art. Even in a public gallery it would need a room to itself. No one could pay attention to a silent painting if this were crying out on the floor.

One of the other works is a perfect sphere suspended from the ceiling by an almost imperceptible thread.

Within this work is a large eye which blinks, waters, dilates and contracts its pupil and reflects a multiplicity of dimly seen images in the changing colour of its iris. It too commands fascinated attention.

To move from these works to the Judith Anderson Gallery in Lorne St where Robert McLeod has a show called Mutant Mickey and the Travellers, until June 13, is to move into another world, but an equally engrossing one.

This is the most outstanding exhibition McLeod has had. And the most explicit. The gallery is crowded with hugely colourful works - nothing with a frame.

All are cut-outs. Some are hung on walls, some arranged in three dimensions, some mounted on skateboards or castors. They are full of astounding life and show remarkable invention of shape and fascinating handling of paint.

You can take an isolated work, apparently one of the simplest, a conventional rocket shape chained to the wall so it doesn't take off. One side of the rocket has an immensely intricate abstract grid, paint on paint. By itself as a surface it would make the name of any abstract painter.

On the other side, dripping from an oval cut in the rocket, long streams of dripping paint emphasise the physical nature of paint and the painting process.

This is one of the minor works. The biggest works are crowded with a multiplicity of effects and shapes that make reading them a joyous task of discovery. It is all visually witty but bizarre.

McLeod's Scottish origins are emphasised by the number of bulging shapes painted with invented "tartans". These are only the beginning and every part interacts as shape and paint with every other as leaping darting, thrusting inventions - each with a life of its own.

Many of the shapes are derived from comic-book forms but if there is one consistent theme it is an explicit sexuality. Bodies are everywhere, sensuous and grotesque. Things spurt and ejaculate alongside stockings and high heels. But the ultimate excitement is not so much sexual as visual.

There are astonishing things. Even the sole of a boot is fine, tactile painting. There is a sharply characterised profile of an old man on a macabre figure that is truly scary, or there are other promenade shapes on which you could rest your chin above an opulent body.

All this exuberance and sexuality is leavened with a sharp wit - not a satiric wit, but a visual wit which delights in emphasising red by simply leaving a pot of red paint on the work.

What looks like anarchy is controlled by a strong painterly intelligence witnessed by the prods in the direction of Clement Greenberg, in Goodbye Clem, and a dig at the likes of Anselm Kiefer in A Mickey for the German Boys where a great accumulation of crusted paint takes the mickey out of the thick encrustations of some recent German art.

It might drive you crazy, it might fascinate you for hours, but this riotous exhibition is the vastly entertaining culmination of McLeod's long development as a painter of painters.