Exhibitions Wellington

AVENAL McKINNON

Tony Lane
Helen Stewart
Robert McLeod
Robert Franken

Tony Lane's exhibition of recent works at the Peter McLeavey Gallery must establish his position as a colourist of note. After a period of abstraction which has lasted from 1975 until 1982 Tony Lane has returned to the figurative image in his painting.

In these works he presents a broadly sensuous space unconfined by drawing. Taking as a point of departure fragments of works by Goya, Titian, Veronese and El Greco, Lane works and reworks them in his own terms. His interest in a counterpointing of forms is strongly evident, the compositions being split by a strong vertical axis created by the join of paper, a painted strip or a break in the canvas. Tree and figure, cloud and tree, man, child and lamb or remembered landscape forms are ranged as complementary or contrasting images pressed mirror-like side by side — a division that he reinforces with warm or cool tones or the balancing thrust and counter-thrust of brush-strokes.

St Sebastian is a retranslation of a key image from the stock of religious painting. As though responding to Nolde's call for 'hot and holy' colour, Lane has welded his own abstract language of colour to the tradition of the icon.

The saint's body, impulsively modelled in icy blue, splintered with white, is slumped in death. Brush-strokes dragged around the contours of the limp form convey solidity, even heaviness. In contrast the tree (its forked branches echoing the figure's pose) is a vibrant mass of purples haloed with an outburst of red. The background — an indeterminate space shot through with a shower of gold — is a densely-applied pattern of movement, as though the rhythms and forces of the scene spill over into the surrounding area in an energy of colour.

There is an overt handling of the material physicality of the surface (also found in his other large oils) — a strong layering of paint and glazes and an emphasis upon the vigorous movement of the brush. This layering of colour is reinforced by pieces of canvas glued directly on to board, creating with their uneven frayed edges their own zones of definition. While this handling of impasto is sometimes in danger of becoming clogged there are passages, such as the cloud in Tree and Cloud, where the broad, expressionistically conceived brush strokes achieve a palpable, elemental force.

Lane's enjoyment of pure pigment is best exemplified in his pastels, where strong, hatched and slanting strokes and planes of colour create a merging of form and medium. Intense, blazing reds, oranges, purplish pinks and blues create a rich improvisatory quality where landscape and figurative elements are freely juxtaposed beside abstract forms. His landscapes have become a myriad of interlocking, luminous shapes which swell and expand across the picture plane in an emphatic flow of colour, charged with an almost Munchian animality.

To commemorate the death of Helen Stewart, an artist whose life spans thie century, the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts has mounted a retrospective exhibition of eighteen of her works.

Born in 1900, a contemporary of Dorothy Kate Richmond, Frances Hodgkins and Gwen Knight, Helen Stewart's work is a continued exploration and working out of ideas, a source of ongoing development still very much in evidence right up to the time of her death in March 1983. Her training involved an impressive list of international institutions including the London School of Art, the St. Martins and Grosvenor SchooLs of Art, London, Colarossi's and La Grande Chaumiere in Paris and the Sydney Art School. She was taught by Andre L'hote in Paris and Thea Proctor in Sydney.

The earliest example of her work in this exhibition is a portrait of Gwen Knight dated 1945, a low-toned interior where the firmly constructed figure and minutely-observed patterns of light suggest affinities with the Camden Town painters. From the late nineteen-forties there is Dry Valley, a landscape of fire-charred skeletal trees and barren ground which has a strong Australian feel.

Four works painted during the nineteen-sixties show Andre L'hote's influence. Here her images are conceived in terms of a near-abstract, rhythmic, formalised patchwork of shapes, a flirtation with decorative Cubism. During the nineteen-seventies she embarked upon a series of broad generalised landscapes drawn from the Canterbury High Country around the Hossack and Clarence Rivers and the Inland Kaikouras.

In these paintings her hills have a strong plastic feeling of mass, built up by simplified blocks of colour which are echoed in the formation of the clouds and the patternings of the sky. The static quality of these mountain forms built up vertically upon the picture-plane is enlivened by a multitude of deliberate brush-strokes creating a rush of vertical and horizontal movement.

Robert McLeod's exhibition of large drawings from the Lanark Series at the Louise Beale Galleg reveal geometric, abstract experiments which verge continually upon the three-dimensional.

Using paper folded, cut and painted, glued, pressed and overlaid, he creates a series of multifaceted, angular forms that assume an almost sculptural presence. Freed from any limiting frame, surface and support are welded together in a pictorial field that is essentially an analysis of inter-related shapes.

These irregular, geometric forms are built up volumetrically, their surfaces presented and represented in a series of unfoldings which are as intricate as origami. Cuboids, rhomboids, hexagons and pyramids are flattened or physically project outwards in an almost Cubist splintering of space. A network of lines, perspectival markings and urgent directional graphite shading suggest with an object-like deliberateness the enfoldings of an envelope, the configurations of a crushed carton and the contours of a landscape. Robert Franken's exhibition A Bird's-Eye View of My Private World at the Wellington City Gallery places him firmly within the tradition of symbolism and the irrational.

A fascination with dream, myths and the inner world of the imagination has resulted in the creation of his own mythology. Signs and symbols drawn from European, Eygptian, Classical and Eastern sources are piled one upon the other in a composite layering of images which carry their own sense of mystery. His curious fusions evoke parallels with Surrealist paranoic double images. Franken's strange, hybrid creatures are metamorphosed from fish to bird and back again. The moon, crescent-shaped, becomes a boat or golden scythe, and the eye, staring or closed in meditation, winged, flippered, even whiskered, assumes a life of its own. This arbitrary depiction of forms and images is interwoven with streams of calligraphy in a torrential outpouring of symbolic messages.

In his mixed media pieces the entire surface becomes a complex though airless structure of intertwining detail, his drawing extraordinarily precise, his script filigree-fine, a gestural memory of Sanskrit, Oriental calligraphy and hieroglyph. Repetition suggests the insistence of a prayer while the clarity of his inscriptions carries the possibility of decoding and deciphering a secret message.

In the pastel works this dense network of signs opens out into a broader handling of forms. His line becomes clearer, the images true fragments, the colours bright and flat, the writing bolder, even emblematic. A single holizon line defines the landscape while the sky, a neutral place both very near and very far, is dominated by vertical columns of calligraphy. Strong diagonal markings suggest movement and the passage of time. Franken's opening up of forms, is carried into his experimental work with dye on fabric. Bird Dancing On a Pink Ground has a freedom and animal vitality reminiscent of Miro, while jewellery (designed by Gillian Snadden), hooked through and sewn on the surface oscillates with dancing shadows creating a kinetic movement that is at once playful and elusive.