Twists elevate well-worn themes

Detail from Rozi Demant's Love Lies Bleeding

Installation art is everywhere these days. The latest in London is a big showpiece at the Tate Modern. It is a slide five stories high by the German artist Carsten Holler and visitors can zip down the spiralling plastic tube at 42km/h.

It has been criticised as more funfair than art but it is already enormously popular.

Such installations - and the ones prominent around Auckland recently - are, by their nature, unsaleable and suited only to public galleries.

Is there any place today for detailed, saleable paintings on traditional themes? Two exhibitions this week suggest that old lodes can still be mined if the artist brings imagination and skill to the work.

The two well-worn themes are: women as flowers, and picturesque corrugated iron sheds; one universal and one local, one romantic and the other cool, one concerned with the human body and the other with human structures.

The theme of women as flowers is the material of Rozi Demant's exhibition called Love Lies Bleeding, at the Warwick Henderson Gallery until November 3.

The other theme of the ubiquity of iron and weathered timber structures in our landscape is the subject of much of Stephen Howard's show Symbiosis at SOCA Gallery in France St until October 27.

Demant's paintings create a world like no other, inhabited only by young women. She has placed her strange, adolescent figures in a surrealist landscape of wide horizons and distant hills populated with her odd girls, flowers and birds.

Each painting has its own prevailing colour and masses of precise detail. She reserves her special invention for her figures. They have long hair, thin arms, dark eyes, pert breasts, big thighs and are clad only in stockings and lacy lingerie. And they all have long, long legs from the knees down. The effect is to make their bodies flowers at the top of tall stalks.

They live in a lurid world dominated by the flower called Love Lies Bleeding, which makes the paintings appear to drip with blood, where the women are victims of assault - emphasised by the way they are often linked to cages and associated with birds. Although they are scantily clad, the women are desperate rather than erotic.

In Bleeding a long line of the women stretches towards the horizon like the followers of Spartacus crucified along the Appian Way, but under a canopy of dripping flowers.

In Grey Pillows there are two women in a place where pillows become rocks. One is linked to a cage, the other to the tall stem of a plant that is crowned with roses.

Here, as elsewhere, the roses are very delicately painted, and a charming example is Swings. But the blood returns in Lace Skirt where a girl with luminous loins and black stockings lies prone with blood-red flowers in her mouth and clutching them to her breast.

Only in the Rococo patterns and pale greens of Fuchsias is the sense of painful sacrifice relieved a little. The prevailing tone of sickly Romanticism will not appeal to everyone but the painstaking attention to detail and sense of concentrated focus reveals an extraordinary vision.

This sense of painstaking attention is also true in the work of Stephen Howard although in his work the light is not theatrical and lurid but pure, bright and lucid.

Typical is Teviot where the absolute centre of the painting is occupied by the facade of a corrugated iron shed crossed with timber planks. The shed is surrounded by meticulously rendered wheat fields which go back to a distant horizon marked by silhouettes of sharply observed trees.

The whole is an exact, formal structure with a strong sense of abstraction. A special quality and a sense of mystery is imparted by the way the wheat - every stem of which seems exactly delineated - lies in tramlines in the foreground.

The quality of the light, painted with great delicacy, is also very beguiling in Peninsula Boatshed, not just in the sky but also as it plays across the water and where it remains translucently green in the shadow under the shed.

Here as elsewhere, doors and windows are boarded up and marked with that strangely crossed timber.

Another feature of the show is that every large, realistic landscape is accompanied by a small painting which subtracts some element from the large work and treats it in a completely abstract way, thereby emphasising the way the major paintings are a careful construct, not just an illustrative transposition of a scene.

It is an exhibition which shows great skill, sometimes used rather mechanically in the sunflowers in the foreground of the arches of Quinn's Arcade, but at its best achieves a still, poised beauty of a special kind.

Both exhibitions have sold extremely well so it is obvious these two familiar paths still attract conservative followers.

The artists are both skilled and thoughtful but in both cases you wonder if they have anywhere to go, any way to develop.

Their achievement is considerable and popular and is reflected in their prices and sales - but they face big challenges to extend their range.