Art seen

''Pavement'', Ben Webb (Gallery De Novo)

Ben Webb is exhibiting at De Novo Gallery and as the title indicates, the images are placed so as to be viewed from the street. By exhibiting in the window and not in the confines of the gallery, the ephemeral nature of the subjects is emphasised by suggesting that they be glanced at by passers-by rather than studied directly.''

Pavement'' features an eclectic series of portraiture and still life and includes a unique collaboration with 1978 University of Otago Robert Burns Fellow, Peter Olds. The appropriated photographic images are distressed by the addition of pigments and opalescent and iridescent washes to evoke strong reactions of melancholy or nostalgia, both in terms of their subject matter and their treatment. The result is powerful yet at the same time they are muted, contemplative and beautiful. Blacks and whites dominate portraits. However, Study I and II (Portrait/Chrysanthemum) is a blending of the face and the chrysanthemum, giving warmth to these works. The show also includes Unique Study, an image of anguish that responds to the horror in Olds' 1972 poem, Schizophrenic Highway. The use of the faded flower and butterfly still-life studies complement these works by acknowledging the fleeting lives of the portrait subjects. Rendered in soft tones and stark blacks, they beg to be viewed as beautiful and disarming yet Webb allows a certain fade to their beauty, creating a sense of longing for something past.''

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''Desk Collection'', Saskia Leek (Dunedin Public Art Gallery)

Saskia Leek's survey exhibition of nearly 60 paintings is a retrospective of her work from 1995 to 2012. ''Desk Collection'' refers to the fact that every painting included in the exhibition could have been produced at a desk - they average A4 in size. The paintings are intimate in subject as well as in scale. Familiar to the viewer, the images are created in response to existing artworks - some inspired from iconic masterpieces, others embracing amateur art found in junk shops.

Leek's early work recalls her teenage years, populated with figures in a painterly suburban background. They combine seemingly unrelated symbols and snippets of text that capture the roving, unsure imaginations of teenage girls as in the youthful zeal of The Gum Fights (1995). Later paintings in this exhibition show a more refined focus that these earlier works lack. Flattened perspectives and a colour palette of pastel pinks, blues and yellows dominate, giving muted form to familiar motifs of still life, landscape, houses and pets, as seen in Animal Home (2007). These simple, refreshing images give way to abstraction with familiar subjects sitting alongside new. The strongest paintings combine delicate muted backgrounds with linear detail, yet a bunch of grapes becomes a recurring motif and colour becomes the most defining element in this later work. Leek extends the rough, unfinished strokes on to the frames of some of these paintings, disrupting the understanding of where the painting begins and ends.

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''Surrender'', Kiri Mitchell (Inge Doesburg Gallery)

On entering Inge Doesburg's gallery, one is not only challenged by the subject matter but also captivated by the drawn and printed images on show by Dunedin printmaker Kiri Mitchell. Done as a series, the multicoloured prints of wrestling male bodies are photo-etched and printed on to brown, white or blue aquatint backgrounds. Mitchell's work engages with the rich print history of satire and it is with this exhibition she has explored the complexities of relationships through illustration. By using the figure as a metaphor, naked and vulnerable, the characters in these works wrestle to gain the upper hand, hence the title of this exhibition. The series is full of black humour and cliches, which is absorbing and sometimes disturbing, with characters depicted in twisted and contorted postural configurations. These scenes are enhanced by the violent perspective which foreshortens and dramatises these figures, stressing their anatomical details.

The works start as large expressive charcoal drawings and this immediacy is retained in the final printed image, with multiple plates used to create movement and vibrant colour. The aquatint process allows a stark contrast between light and shadow, providing not only a mysterious dark quality but the colour around the main subjects adds to the intensity of the characters' emotions.

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- by Julie Joop