Mining the riches of a painter's memory

By T.J. McNAMARA

How far will one idea carry a painter? At least as far as one good exhibition. Rohan Wealleans, whose Residual Love is at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until Saturday, has the idea of laying down layer after layer of paint, sometimes interspersed with layers of paper, then covering the lot with a thickly textured surface which is worked into a landscape with round hillocks and an irregular edge. This is covered with a coating of nondescript, ugly paint.

Then there is the revelation. The surface is cut through with a sharp knife. The cuts are on an angle so the underlying layers appear as contours. The paper layers are folded back and pinned.

The opening created in each of these works evokes many ideas. The first suggestion is a wound with the skin peeling back to expose layers of blood and flesh. Yet the effect is at once richer and more static than a wound, so suggestions of buried treasure are evoked. Yet this is too specific. The feeling is more of mining, of discovering extensive riches.

It also evokes all the experiences one ever had of sanding paint in an old house, where the colours preferred by generations before come to light, or of stripping wallpaper, only to find layers of other paper underneath. Wealleans is painting memory.

The idea of the unfolding of a flower is also present strongly and there is a clear sexual connotation. One work is a free-standing ball made of so many layers it took a year to create. Its fascinating interior is revealed by a slice cut out like a cheese.

The exhibition is successful where it educates our eye to look into the heart of things, to find visual excitement in any unfolding of something hidden to the eye. It also impresses by the sheer cleverness and determination of the making of these objects.

Where the show is unsuccessful is in its mistrust of beauty. The post-modern desire to put an ironic spin on everything has led the artist to adopt vile colours for his surfaces and even when he adds little rectangles of brighter colour these are painted as cracked and old. The major wounds reveal almost unbelievably intricate effects of colour but the colour never sings.

There is never a joyous revelation, only a denial of beauty. The show is a discovery in many senses of the word but it does little to lift the heart.

John Pule's work at the Gow Langsford Gallery (until March 23) has developed further away from the patterns resembling tapa cloth that contained his symbolic imagery towards a more individual way of expressing the journey of his mind.

The large works are big splodges of red which have been wiped or allowed to drip so they float as islands of thought against the white of the canvas.

These thoughts or stages of life all carry images drawn in fine ink lines. The images are like a stream-of-consciousness style in writing; they obviously lead from one to the other but the links are not clearly apparent. They also suggest a journey and the movement is always upward.

The title work, I Had a Mind as Invisible as Light, takes some time to read and often the imagery is obscure, although such things as a church within a tight, black frame are obvious.

The imagery is at its richest in Tapuakainga, where the "islands" are linked by ropes which carry twisted roots. Pule's drawing is rudimentary but when he draws organic things such as trees and vines and birds it is effective enough for his purpose.