Striking abstract notes in art

By T.J. McNAMARA

Helmut Federle, who has an exhibition in Auckland this week, said when he was being interviewed at the 1995 Venice Biennale that, "paint was beyond language," the process of visual art had no equivalent in words.

That painting is one thing and language is another with no point of intersection is an aspect of polarity. This week's exhibitions have a lot to do with polarity: abstract and real, beauty and ugliness, dark and light, popular and elite.

When we talk about art the language we use is often the language of music: harmony, composition, rhythm, counterpoint are terms that transfer from music to painting. The art of Cherie Knott in her popular exhibition, Music Myth and Metaphor, at the Chiaroscuro Gallery is all about music.

Knott paints musicians at work, as a full orchestra, in practice rooms or in private groups.

The paintings are full of swirling rhythms - sometimes fine lines like violin arpeggios, sometimes big sweeps of brown colour like the mellow tones of the cello.

Each image is the visual equivalent of musical rapture.

But music exists in time and painting exists in space. Music moves along and the progression is important. Fixing a moment is a tricky business.

The results are mixed.

Knott has a variety of formats for her moments. Some are tall and narrow, others square and solid. Her best moments are big compositions full of movement and vivid colour which is the equivalent of rapturous sound.

Vivaldi, Beethoven, Debussy and Rachmaninov are invoked in the titles of the works. The most striking images concern women, although, curiously, most of the women are naked and the men are clothed. A woman conductor in front of a full orchestra is wearing only her socks.

The identification of women with music is seen at its most enchanting in The Dawn of the Flute Players, where the luscious green of natural beauty swoops in through an open window and envelopes the young musicians in its shades of green.

The blazing vortex of Orchestra Sunrise is equally dramatic but without the subtleties of charm.

Throughout the exhibition beauty and charm are continually toughened by elements of the grotesque and ugly, particularly in the big sculpture The Kiss and the Violin, the exhibition's centrepiece. This bronze work is full of swooping, energetic rhythms and, like the other sculptures, owes an obvious debt to Rodin. A kneeling figure buries his face against the belly of a violinist.

The image's romantic nature is subverted as much by the big, oddly exposed muscle on the thigh of the woman as by the cave-like hollows at her collar bones and her Neanderthal face. The polarities are even apparent in the way one breast has a prominent nipple and the other is smooth.

This immensely copious exhibition is obviously the result of hard work and a remarkable visual talent that finds exciting shape in things as simple as a piano lid.

It is abstract art above all that demands analogies with music.

The Austrian master of abstract painting Helmut Federle has some paintings at the Jensen Gallery in Upper Queen St. In this show, the paintings need close attention and the catalogues available on a table exert their own fascination.

The catalogues feature Federle's work exhibited at all those white, bare galleries that dot Europe, such as the Museum for Gegenwartskunst in Basle. The photographs of Federle's studios and houses also show austere walls, square windows and plain, geometric furniture. Even the paintings stacked against the walls are exquisitely arranged. The catalogues also indicate status of the sort that leads to the Venice Biennale.

All this is in keeping with the artist's work which is an art of stillness, calm control of simple elements placed in opposition. Polarity once again.

The great 20th-century apostle of extreme abstract painting Ad Reinhardt said of his work: "I am making the last painting anyone can make."

Federle shows that though you cannot go beyond the extreme of minimal art you can provide fresh variants on the style. He does not feel the need to redefine art, he just works on his own balanced, melancholic versions of minimalist.

His abstractions have a climate of their own which is not the result of any graphic device but lies largely in their green and grey colours, which draw the viewer into the painting.

The eye works around and into the balanced forms.

For all their classical simplicity, the paintings are not flawless. In an intriguing example of the artist's Black Series, 16 separate little panels have four rectangles coming forward, merging and parting again. Was it part of the artist's intention that the procession should be so disrupted at panel 10?

Interestingly, several of the paintings are dedicated to composers Erik Satie and Gustav Mahler.

The connection can only be that Federle's abstract painting, like music, does not represent things and therefore leaves space for spiritual meditation.