Art Seen: February 23

In this week's Art Seen, Laura Elliott looks at exhibitions from Ben Ho, Nigel Brown, and Charlotte Handy.

Piano Man, by Ben Ho

‘‘Surrounding Visions’’, Ben Ho (Lakes District Museum and Gallery, Queenstown)

Born in Guangzhou, China, painter Ben Ho's work is a fascinating study into Eastern and Western culture, an exploratory fusion of delicate Impressionism, vibrant Expressionism, surrealism and realism, all woven with a storyteller's narrative flair, a spiritual warmth, and the odd detour into complete abstraction. Every piece has a powerful draw, wrapping around the viewer and pulling them closer to examine and wonder.

With its stripped-down geometry, Ignite - Dynamic I is the most abstract of the canvases, the most open to individual interpretation - it somehow spoke to me of music, while it probably conveyed something very different to the person standing at my side.

The Seasons series is lovely and very clever: snapshots of nature - a burst of greenery or serene, light-dappled water that employs texture, tone and movement to evoke the sense of the changing seasons.

In other works, the depiction of nature is more brutal and challenging, confronting the perpetual cycles of predators and prey, consumption and fertilisation, and the danger of human interference in that natural order.

What comes through most clearly in this exhibition is an intense spiritual and intellectual curiosity. Ho seamlessly pulls together universal threads of nature, humanity, religion, life and death, and the result is almost a collated tapestry - individual and vastly different paintings that collectively provide an insight into human experience.

Time moves forward, but the eternal preoccupations, mysteries, violence and faith endure.

No. 8 Wire, by Nigel Brown

‘‘I Am / We Are’’, Nigel Brown (Central Stories Museum and Art Gallery, Alexandra)

Nigel Brown has been one of this country's premier contemporary artists for over three decades, and his retrospective ''I Am / We Are'' presents an unparalleled opportunity to see a visual record of that career - tracing the evolution of ideas, mapping his physical travels and emotional growth, and highlighting the development of his characteristic style. His work is instantly recognisable with its heavy outlines, bold blocks of colour, New Zealand iconography, and painted words that cross the gamut from the poignant to the satirical.

Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the search for a national cultural identity consumed many of New Zealand's emerging artists, and Brown both incorporates and turns a quizzical brow on that quest with works such as Damaged Landscape, a composition that - among several other Kiwi icons balanced precariously on fracturing ground - focuses on a tin of Edmonds baking powder.

A ubiquitous figure in his canvases is the farmer in his black singlet, and pieces such as No. 8 Wire are a respectful nod to our rural culture and history, tinged with the nostalgia of the pastoral ideal. In Organic Aoteroa and Super New Zealand, that concept of clean and green is played off against the widespread preoccupation with urban development and technological advancement.

The geometrical structure and fragmented perspective in the large-scale Will to Meaning and Sea Rising is ingenious; influenced by Russian Constructivist art, Brown used repeating patterns, piecing together angles like a Cubist jigsaw to create the illusion of moving objects suspended in infinite surrounding darkness.

Edith, by Charlotte Handy.

‘‘Reverie and Trance’’, Charlotte Handy (Milford Galleries, Queenstown)

The title, ''Reverie and Trance'', might seem like a literal description of the two-dimensional portraits that dominate Handy's current exhibition, as the eyes of the depicted women seem to stare out of the picture plane and right through the viewer, making no attempt to forge a direct connection. However, like the works themselves with their careful build-up of blocks of colour, the terms reverie and trance dig into layers and depths of meaning.

Described as evolving from the shadowy, haunting dream state between sleep and full consciousness, Handy's canvases perfectly capture that sense of hazy recollection.

Squares of background colour recur among the flesh tones of the skin, creating an almost shimmery effect, like trying to focus on the minute details of an object under moving water.

There is an inhuman quality to the faces, an otherworldly calmness and elusiveness, that is echoed in the landscapes. Works such as Tropic of Capricorn present the fundamental pieces of a recognisable scene - water, hills, sky - but Handy carefully skews the composition with her arrangement of lines and angles, and a patchwork of pattern and colour, and suddenly the viewer is on shaky ground.

It's almost familiar, but not quite, and the effect is unsettling and very effective. Among the standout pieces are the abstracted bird studies; it's difficult to be certain whether the creatures are friend or foe - fitting inhabitants for the fragmented prisms of Handy's dream lands.

-By Laura Elliott