Masters of the art of illusion show their worth

By T.J. McNAMARA

It's virtuoso week. The virtuosity is in creating illusion. Viewers of art love illusion. The crowds at the City Gallery during Queen's Birthday were exceptional. One factor that attracted them was Grahame Sydney's representation of the southern light of Central Otago.

His heartfelt response to the emptiness of this region, which he has made his own, produces what might be called "adagio" paintings, long, slow and melancholy.

The most typical show a landscape empty of people, with brown folding hills and an expanse of sky. In the accurate representation there is also a sense of uneasiness that contributes to the particular quality of the work.

The vast space of this region is so lonely that in the excellent video that accompanies the exhibition we see the artist working at his painting while straddling the white centre line of a road, secure in the knowledge that he won't be disturbed by a passing car or truck.

The long roads and railway tracks that disappear into the aptly named vanishing point are central to Sydney's work. He does not show people, only the geometric signs of human occupancy at odds with the natural variations of the hills.

Signs are important for Sydney. Road signs figure in many of the works. They are generally seen from the back so their message is unknown but their presence is real and brooding. In some of the best paintings the signs are covered with cloth, their meanings veiled further.

The viewer searches in vain for philosophy in these paintings. They just are. Another element that draws people is the feeling that somehow the lonely landscapes of the Maniototo are central to the New Zealand experience.

"On the upland road/Ride easy, stranger," says James K. Baxter, our next-best thing to a prophet.

For all the crowding in the gallery there is a sense of strangeness, almost intrusion, in these works. But Baxter goes on to say in the same short poem, "Surrender to the sky your heart of anger."

In addition to delight in how accurately corrugated iron or the light on ponds and hills are painted, what the crowds are getting from these paintings is a sense that they are small counters in a great enigmatic game. It gives a sense of peace.

What makes these paintings work on the heart is the feeling of illusionist depiction of floods of light and the consequent shadows.

The contrasts between light and dark are beautifully worked, particularly when the light is seen through the geometric opening of window and doorway. These portals, the work of humans, are fragile against the mountains and plains.

This is expressed beautifully in a work such as Demolition at Waipiata, where a weatherboard facade provides openings into the wider view beyond. The effect of long shadows can be seen at its most potent in the slanting shadow of a light fitting in South Mine.

The romantic effect of derelict buildings is also a feature. Literary parallels are evoked everywhere, not just Janet Frame but things such as Allen Curnow's line about the "sad dunny" in his splendid poem Wild Iron. The feeling of this poem is an exact parallel to a work such as Weatherboards at Couden.

Not all the work is as successful. Surprisingly, the night pieces with their ostentatious black frames look pretentious. The nudes are dead. The figure in Silent Studio is just so much lard, and the ominous shadow that raises itself behind the sofa does nothing to add tension to a grey work. Equally grey are the portraits and still-life paintings. Only when the still-life is related to the landscape does it have power.

The gibbeted postbag hanging on an iron hook in Private Bag is the outstanding work in the show, though almost equalled by the nearby painting of a melancholy, limp windsock hanging in the air.

The work more than bears comparison with similar paintings by such famous names as Andrew Wyeth and Georgia O'Keeffe, but Sydney is the outstanding example here of a regional painter hewing his own trail with single-minded determination and results that have captured the mind of the public.

Across the road at the Gow Langsford Gallery is another kind of virtuosity. Mervyn Williams makes believe that the flat surface of his paintings is punctuated with mysteriously achieved three-dimensional splashes and ripples and dramatic textures in paint.

His pieces generally play two panels against each other. One panel shows regularly spaced elements and the other irregular, painterly gestures.

The atmosphere of each piece, governed by the colour and the buttons and ridges that were his stock-in-trade, have rewardingly given way in some places to sweeping circular gestures which are particularly effective in the big yellow and red painting called Firewheel hidden away in the office.

Another aspect of virtuosity is to take one element and repeat it, each time with a subtle variation. At the McPherson Gallery, Paul V. Johnston does this limited virtuoso trip stylishly, and in the other room Ian Jervis matches his skill by painting convincing pits.

These holes exist on a broad plane of consciousness and are matched by a black void. These profound pits are sometimes shielded, sometimes abrupt but as well as a lively paint surface they offer metaphors for plunges the mind might take below the surface of life.