Art seen: Saints and demigods

James Dignan looks at the latest exhibitions in Dunedin.

"We're all dancing on the same floor", Moray Gallery Dropping anchor, by Eion Shanks.

Eion Shanks' large portraits are an enigma.

In these heavily stylised oils, often with some charcoal elements, religious and mythological symbolism walks hand in hand with the artist's own cryptic language.

Haloed saints and semi-naked demigods move in mysterious ways through these works, performing their occult miracles and acts.

In some pieces, the setting is disarmingly modern, as in the children's mechanical ride of Cheap rides.

In others, we enter a world of myth come to life, or view a timeless, archetypal scene.

The artist himself seems in little hurry to explain the works.

There is no indication of an artist's statement, and the titles are by turn prosaic and cryptic.

The art itself is done in a bold expressionist style which owes something to such schools as Die Brucke and Russia's early 20th-century Jack of Diamonds group, yet the artist's secret language of sign sets it apart from these influences, notably in such arcane works as Tickling up the young dragon.

The pieces are well composed and painted with panache, though exactly what it is they are saying remains a mystery.

"New works", Milford Galleries

It is said that the truly bizarre is less unnerving than something almost, but not quite real.

If something is only slightly skewed from the normal, it becomes sinister and disquieting in a way that the completely unrealistic cannot be.

So it is with Gary Waldrom's art.

Waldrom produces large canvases showing an alternative world under whose claustrophobic blood-red skies live a dreamlike carnival of characters who seem both familiar and alien.

His dreamscape Hawkes Bay is deeply unsettling because it is simultaneously mundane and unreal; it is not that the people and places are parodied, more that the artist has brought some subtle undercurrents to the surface with his brush.

In Waldrom's current exhibition, the artist has used numerous artistic techniques skilfully to create unfinished backdrops against which his characters perform.

And perform they do - if all the world is a stage, then the inhabitants of Waldrom's paintings are a circus come to town, and we become voyeurs of their lives.

Each picture tells a tale which is only half grasped, left for us to complete or contemplate the completion of.

As such, each new viewing of the works conjures up new thoughts as to the protagonists and their world - a world that the mere viewer can only dream of entering.

"Moment in time", The Artist's Room

Dalene Meiring also creates characters who live in their own world, yet the subjects of her portraits inhabit a less sinister realm.

Meiring's stylised soft-focus pieces show pensive figures lost in thought.

The colours are muted - gentle harmonious tones that enhance the contemplative element in the works.

There is an air of calm serenity about many of the paintings.

Any tension these figures display is a deep inner conflict, not the bubbling external disquiet of Waldrom.

Many of the figures are shown grouped against plain uncluttered backgrounds, or surrounded by blooms, eyes half-closed or turned away from the viewer.

These works are epitomised by One last time, a reinterpretation of The Last Supper.

Portraiture is the most prominent thread in the exhibition, though there are other subjects on display.

These rightly take up far less of the work presented.

One soft-focus work is a study of the flowers which form the surround for one of the figurative works, and this fits well with the portraits alongside.

In two other works, strangely two-dimensional cows inhabit a stylised farmscape, and two more works are semi-abstract pieces with some figurative elements.

Though these works are good, they suffer by comparison with the stronger portraits nearby.