Justin O'Brien @ AGNSW

I've found the AGNSW's summer exhibition of the work of painter Justin O'Brien, subtitled 'the Sacred Music of Colour' curiously difficult to write about. It's a show I should love, a modern painter working with the iconography of the early (and pre) renaissance attempting to find relevance in traditional religious set-pieces and yet it there is something oddly unsatisfying . There is much to be charmed by in the beautifully hung upper rooms of the Sydney gallery but one is constantly struck by a contradiction between the restlessness of O'Brien's stylistic shifts and the stillness in the work itself.

The earlier work of O'Brien takes us through a search for a style, and whilst it's not entirely helpful (or terribly interesting) to take a trip through that restless search for a style it does show O'Brien looking for influences with painters who favoured extreme colour palates. Hence its of Cezanne and Matisse poke through even when the post-war dowdiness remains dominant. So it's not exactly surprising when you find a kind of Gaugin enthronement, It could be the garden of Eden or the Botanic Gardens 0f Sydney. Eve and the baptism are echoed in colour, but its Australian rather than genuinely tropical origins are betrayed by a predictably prudish fig leaf on the Polynesian Adam and Eden seems a very modest place.

Four portraits hung together are instructive, the subjects are treated so closely that it's a surprise to find they're not all self-portraits. These young men all have long stretched ovoid faces, wan and pale, chalky complexions and full lips they exude a certain sadness but little else, even as washes of wall swirl or scarlet clothes bleed into the frame. It's an odd effect characteristic of a visual tension in much of O'Brien's work between formal control and colourful abandon.

It's seen clearest in the fight between those fleshy mouths and the geometric planes of cheekbones, the stylisation (not unlike Modigliani) seems to suppress the individual force of faces and bodies. Colour, blocks and abstract swathes, seems more candid, but when in a portrait of one boy the split background suggests a split between purple storms and yellow lulls you are left with a disconnect between it and the serene face. I will generally run a mile to avoid an amateur psycho-biographical reading of painting but the tender restraint and studiously avoided carnality of some of these images made it no surprise to learn that they were painted by a young gay man in post Second World War century Australia.

It's not a boring exhibition by any means. Amongst the lushness are constant echoes, here we glimpse, Raphael's virgin, repeatedly Fra Angelico's blue and gold Enthronement, a kiss of judas every bit as strange as de Chirico but with the statuesque quaities of Mantegna or a Venus at here batch that might have been painted by Rousseau but with bodies of fleshy spheres and cylinders that are idealized exercises in solid geometry. The visual and iconographic restlessness of some of the work here also brings some sense to his settling on a few subjects (the dormition of the virgin, the miraculous draught of fishes amongst others) and a gently stylized almost Romanesque cubism (feel free to see it and describe it better, I see something of both). O'Brien values harmony, tonal and compositional, but he also represents moments of grace, acceptance and quiet dignity. Even in his Pieta, a tiny deflating Christ draped across a sculptural doe eyed virgin, the signs of his death a single faint stroke of the brush in a brown only a shade or two lighter than the skin, O'Brien finds peace in loss.

One thinks of modern artists appropriating the formal traits of the Renaissance and one expects a subversion or perhaps at least a constructive tension between that historically specific style and its codified subject matter. For instance Balthus frequently used Piero della Francesca as a model but released the dangerous heart of sex along with angelic longing. That doesn't happen with O'Brien in fact the opposite is true, the paintings seem to breath in and hold themselves tight in the hope of a graceful reception. It's almost the reverse of tension as compositions are politely balanced and colours are layered and complementary. O'Brien chose to paint things that sit on the cusp between medieval and renaissance style but doesn't even capture the tension between beauty and suffering, salvation and pain that we see in works by Giotto and Cimabue. O'Brien is clearly enchanted by the shapes and colours of this period but without the underlying tension between the human and the celestial that we feel in their original application these paintings seem little more than decorative.

And yet these works have a subtle and discreet power so it sin worth asking ourselves what else O'Brien might be trying to do. Many of O'Brien's images unfold as gentle sombre pageants, and soon you notice that typically most characters are there to bear witness rather than to act. That passiveness is further borne out by the smoothed line and imperceptible brush-strokes. Rather than bringing the expressionist whorl of modernism to an antique subject. These stretched figures can seem like bleached out El Grecos and perhaps that lack of mannerist drama is what makes them feel peculiar to a modern eye, especially when one considers the influence of El Greco on so many strains if modern painting.

In a show that shines with gold and lapis blue the most touching works are his subdued stations of the cross, pastel tissues of wash give life through restraint. There's a surreal minimal landscape, a washy polygonal delerium and a minimum of figures. The more restrained palette seems to release more gut spirit, a sadness and a clinging to life rather than a jolly gloss of pigment. The under drawings are penned in the firm sinuous lines of an engraver and their clarity also lends them a fragility . The Christ figure dominates, and although he's no less stylized than O'Brien's other figures he is far more physical thanks to the choice of pose, he falls and bends and each diversion from the perpendicular feels critical, a structure falling under stress. Viewed as a sequential series the work grows in power, it begins brighter then light fades from the polychrome of Pilate's condemnation to the bone bleached blue of the sepulchre. Hung in a U-shape in a gently lit room the sequence is gentle and meditative even as it is wracked with an inevitable path to the cross. It is a fine work in any context.

If you look beyond the subject matter and the blues and golds you get a sense that O'Brien painted light. Not the chiarascuro that needs shadow to bring it alive or the directional light as it flickers across impressionist water but the way that light bathes our overall perception. The chalkiness of the later still lives and the bone bleaching of some of the Greek landscape suggest less objects struck by light but the way it occupies the air. A Baptism on a Greek island might be set in a swimming hole, with its summery nostalgia for casual male nudity, but the gold above the pinky blue mesmerizes and you feel the warm soak of a summer day. This isn't the light of revelation or of the theatre, far from it as even in a scene of the taking of Christ in Gethsemane a lantern fails to emit rays, but rather a still radiance, an immersive substantial light.

Justin O'Brien was clearly an anachronism. It's less extraordinary that much of the very proper and restrained work here was made in the Twentieth Century that is was made in the 1960s, so much of it feels like it might have come form a more careful and polite period, one where individualism had not yet been fetishized. In fact such is the sense of quiet conformity that often Jesus's disciples look like a private school sports team on a day out. And perhaps that is the root of O'Brien's creative tension, that between conformity and individuality. Clearly anyone who decides to paint his own obsessive hommage to early-rennaissance frescoes at the end of the 1950s isn't a conformist. I'm willing to accept that there is something deep in O'Brien's work and that is veiled in a visual embrace of the gentle and the contemplative in the face of culture romanticizing shrill expressions of individualism. The sense of grace, of a surrender to ones fate, might not be terribly fashionable but that makes it no less vauable.

On The Path To Abstraction @ AGNSW

Currently 'creativity' is a word rarely uttered in art word circles. The importance of the concept, the contradiction and the hones paradox is king, clothed or not, and the idea of an individual impulse to seek form and shape for an interior impulse is smiled at as being hopelessly romantic. In that post-modern art school context one might shy away from a portmanteau show about the phenomenon of abstraction, expecting it to be full of dogma and theory. Happily that's not the case. 'Paths To Abstraction' at Sydney's AGNSW feels a little like exhibition as lecture, but that shouldn't sound like faint praise. Throughout the rooms there hangs such an intricate gossamer web of influence and impulse that rather than an harangue this lecture feels like the best sort, a gentle and persuasive nudge toward connection and insight.

A modest selection of Whistler begins the show. Straightaway it's an interesting hang (curatorially that is, the staging is pretty modest given the sensory possibilities and later a single red room feels like it's been left over from something else) the two Whistler pieces show his astonishing dive into a musical palette of smudged impressions. 'Nocturne: Black and Gold' from 1875 is striking for its gentle introspective depiction of an explosive shower of fireworks and for the way that a black wash, the fingerprints of vertical drips and a sneeze of gold can capture something so perfectly. The smear of a Victorian night gives away little but captures all. The paint is less redolent of smoke and meteorological effects than it is the blur between perception and memory. Like so much in this exhibition a small canvass feels like the epicenter of something seismic. That's reinforced when he's hung next to impersonators, one of whom appears to be a young Picasso.

What strikes one as impressive throughout is not so much the paths taken as the impulses that have driven artists toward the abstract. The number of groups and movements represented through Impressioninsts, Fauvists, Constructivists, Cubists, Expressionists, Nabis and Futurists begin to demonstrate that abstraction is less a formal style than a communicative necessity. It's certainly possible to see tracks that link artists and images, intentional or not Cezanne to Analytical Cubism looks the groove of a well trodden short cut, but these aren't as interesting as seeing (or sometimes just feeling) the shared impulse between visually dissimilar works. The breadth of colour and shape and construction serve a question to the modernist notion of abstraction as being a purely painterly approach that separated paint from subject or object. Braque's analysis of shape is a response to an accelerating and mechanizing world just as the Futurists try to mould a new kind of speed and change in pigment. Again and again artists appear to be wrestling at the edge of their practice, forcing something more onto the canvass than they've seen before. It's like watching the transition between thought and expression again and again, each time with fewer boundaries.

The sheer eroticism of so much of the work here shouldn't be understated. Before the Ab-Ex model of artist as priapic savant had been established the sheer lubricity of form and colour that writhes from these pictures can only have been shocking. As figurative subjects begin to melt then artists are left with form, shape and materials, the physicality of a lot of the paintings is sensuous and sexy but the visual interplay, the rhymes and responses takes you to the most intimate relationships. Where sex is most literally apparent, the nudes of Bonnard and Delaunay, they take on a delirious character. It's almost as though El Greco's holy spirit has become the vibration filled air of desire (Maurice Denis' more devout Calvary might remind us of that master of Spain too). There are three versions of Robert Delaunay's 'Nude Woman Reading' and as the voyeuristic scene becomes less representative, the connections looser, the shapes more fetishized and symbolic of a thigh or a buttock it becomes more lubricous and affecting. The book and table retain their physical image and the woman fades, making Delaunay's subject nothing less than sex itself.

This is the great discovery of abstraction. That one can capture essence. Matisse's 'Nude in the Woods' is both essential and conceptual. You're immediately struck by the pinks and just enough hint of a posture to make the title redundant. The fuschia seems to expand and populate the painting, echoed by lilac blocks of sky. Pink is the brilliant tonal analog of flesh, the image is overtaken by it fleshiness, its nudeness, just as dropping a nude into a landscape possesses the rest of the image. Matisse goes further, the nude itself is not the pinkest area of the picture, it's the scratchiest lumpiest. Even as he pushed himself into the abstract Matisse uses colour to show something perfectly flawed and human. It's a small painting but it contains so much it's dizzying.

One of the brilliant and refreshing elements here is the equal weight given to lithographs. woodcuts and other print-making techniques. The relatively easy dissemination of editioned works on paper is another thread that winds around and across this path to abstraction. So too does the demand of media where limitations of means inspire the most direct and economical expression. Kandinsky's 'Blue Rider' might be as influential as any work here, and it shares a lineage with Gaugin's tribal woodcuts and Munch's interior projections. The woodcut might have been as important in the spread of a more abstract essentialist art as the printing press had been the ideas and techniques of linear perspective in that earlier seismic shift. Some of the works on paper are sublimely beautiful and they highlight masters of different media, like Gaugin and especially Bonnard. It's good not to see them relegated to the margins.

The show is not perfect, the final room entitled 'the limits of abstraction' feels like a stumble on the path. It is neither a resolution or the posing of a question to take out into the world. And, to be honest, Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel has probably spun round enough shows about enough things for it not to shed much light on where this particular path leads to. The best themed shows reveal something about ourselves far more than they shine a light on particular artists. As an exercise in topography 'Paths to Abstraction' is interesting, however as a demonstration of the human mind and its desperate and essential need to communicate the unspeakable and ineffable it throws up echoes, shadows and harmonies that will stay with viewers every time they encounter the boring formalist and theoretical explanations for the modern and conceptual. That ability to make us look at fare more recent work differently an better makes this show a success.