Wounds that bind us spiritually

By T.J. McNAMARA

Art is making tangible things express the intangible workings of the spirit.

Art and religion have a common basis in the spirit. In many ways art has become religion. Of the millions who visit the Sistine Chapel in Rome, more are there for Michelangelo's art than the Pope's religion, though one begat the other.

Yet religion still produces a symbolism that helps artistic expression.

In the work of Tony Lane, at the Jensen Gallery in Upper Queen St, there are often tables hung with linen that suggest both an altar and the Last Supper. This immediately establishes that we are in an area about sacramental things and the workings of the spirit.

This is not religious in the sense of expounding dogma. We now recognise that there can be a religious experience that is apart from dogma.

Lane uses the sense of religion to suggest that wounds and pain may have their own purpose and are part of our experience of life and art.

To convey the sense of how treasure may be stored in the spirit he uses gold and tabernacle shapes, sometimes surrounded by beading in relief to suggest the effect of reliquaries, in which precious things from the past are stored.

At one level this produces merely beautiful objects which can be admired as the visitor to Spain admires the workmanship of a reliquary in the sacristy of a Spanish church without feeling much for the bones of the saint enclosed in it.

Precious relics sit in the tabernacles, which sit on the solemn tables, conveying images of the hurt that life inflicts. The memories of these wounds float as blue wound shapes among gold and linen.

The idea of the preciousness of wounds is made explicit in a small work called specifically Wound, which has a hand with long fingers and a wound in the palm, and four areas of gold leaf, which make the work a treasure.

A work such as Three Tables extends the idea in a more abstract way and on a larger scale. The tables are as epic as mountains, which are also the subject of one of the paintings.

Adding to the effect is a sense of age conveyed by the dark, rubbed obscure backgrounds. This mysterious background is seen at its most effective in Chair, one of several works in which a gold chair represents both the individual and a sense of authority like the chair, or cathedra, that makes a cathedral a cathedral - the seat of a bishop.

You can, in a quiet way, worship them for their art or their spirit.

Bishops wear purple, priests wear black. Both tints are an essential part of the work of Christopher Braddock at the Gow Langsford Gallery.

Much of the work resembles the little tokens hung in front of images of St Anthony of Padua by the grateful pious who have prayed to him and been healed. Once again the feeling of the Catholic Mediterranean is present - Spain or Italy.

These are not random tokens; they are ranked and ordered.

The material of their ordering is masses of ribbon in purple and black, intricately and ingeniously woven to join curious nickel-plated objects, pierced and vaguely sexually suggestive.

The sexual context is more explicit in the central work of the exhibition, Chandelier. With immense patience and craftsmanship, elements in steel have been made into a large chandelier connected by ribbon.

Each of the elements is a heart surmounted by a cross, so far, so religious, but at the centre of each heart is an orifice, this time so sexual.

Sex and religion as an equation is at least as old as Bernini's 17th century Ecstasy of St Teresa, where union with God is symbolised by earthly orgasm but only seldom has the idea been expressed as a light fixture.

A further extension is an ingenious work of mirror called Repository I, which enshrines a velvet cushion indented as a setting for a relic or elegant buttocks.

The total effect is of elegant decadence left over from the fin-de-siecle mood of a previous decade.

Next door, at the new city version of the John Leech Gallery, is a remarkable exhibition by John Walsh in which the spirit is working not as religion but as myth and metaphor.

There is a strong Australian quality about this painter's technique. The works are done on hardboard or on metal so that the paint can be kept thin but worked into with a dry brush so that there is constant energy in the handling of the mythical figures against a dark background.

The technique might be Australian but the material has its profound origin in Aotearoa. The tiki is used as an expression of family, and everywhere there is a strange dance of figures that are bizarre and beyond control but short of demonic.

They cavort in the loop of infinity in Haere Tawhiti 2001 and there is more than a hint of Goya in The Return of Ruatepupuke, carried glowing red in a procession.

The exhibition must catch something in the spirit here since it has sold readily. Some of the paintings will play a leading part in Purangiaho, the exhibition of contemporary Maori art that is the next major event at the Auckland Art Gallery.