Exhibitions Christchurch

RODNEY WILSON

RUDOLPH GOPAS Paintings, drawings and a solograph

In this exhibition Rudolph Gopas, long established as one of the foremost mentors of Christchurch painting and all too seldom seen in this city's galleries, showed paintings, drawings and a solograph - a machine designed to measure the heat intensity of sunlight, and at the same time produce through the agency of light a graphic image on paper.

Gopas has withdrawn into his art and self. There is no longer any clear demarcation between what constitutes the motif, the artist and the image. For Gopas they are interchangeable as he wrestles with the megalomaniacal problems of existence and celestial measurement, painting stars, galaxies and the sun and measuring the immeasurable with his own quasi-scientific systems. Gopas is there in the middle of the universe - ME superimposed upon a sun glowing amongst muted colour on coarse hessian identifying life-sustaining light with the life-enriching artist. It is a mystical extension of the Copernican sun-centred universe to an ego-centred one.

ALAN PEARSON Portraits and Poetry

Alan Pearson is now revealed as a portraitist of consistent and at times remarkable application in a retrospective portrait show. Fifteen years of portraiture are on show (from 1961 until May 1976), and the impression that emerged - one of strength and penetrating vision - must confirm Pearson's unshakable position in the exclusive club of New Zealand portraitists.

Pearson's environment is people. As he progresses from one relationship to another, one confrontation to another, one psychic interaction to another the portraits and the poems published along with the exhibition appear as parallel products of his perception and sensibility.

ALAN PEARSON Portrait of Justin Pearson 1974
oil, 60.1 x 49.6 cm
(Brooke/Gifford Gallery)