Polixeni Papapetrou: Tales from Elsewhere @ Australian Centre for Photography

There is one truly beautiful and fascinating photography show in Sydney right now, and it isn't Annie Liebovitz. The Australian Centre for Photography on Oxford Street is home to 'Tales from Elsewhere' a gorgeously hung, vivid and provocative retrospective of works by Polixeni Papapetrou. Like the fairy tales she plays with (the dominant and recurring theme in her work) Papapetrou presents scenes of apparent whimsy that even with the slightest pause seethe with undercurrents of ambiguity. Again and again we are pulled below surface and between so many images and ideas in tension, between the innocence and sexuality of children, the dangers lurking between fantasy and reality and the questions between meaning and response.

The title 'Tales from Elsewhere' is apposite for the show.  It's hung in darkened rooms where light picks out big luscious photographs and you feel transported from the harsh summer light outside.  What's clear is that 'Elsewhere' isn't and external place though, it's very much an interior landscape, specifically that of children and our own memories of childhood.  The first room of note shows a series of black and white portraits of children wearing masks and fancy dress outfits. Together with the costumes the children wear the blacked out studio and the silvery black and white place the images somewhere timeless and indeterminate, between the Victorian child exploitation and the sexualised tots of today's child beauty pageants.  Papapetrou creates a sense of dislocation by placing the children in lush featureless black backgrounds, each child has a costume but what makes them disturbing is the masks, oversized and of adult eyes, that each wears.  The difference in scale is disconcerting, it demands you look again and recalibrate and that's the point at which the very adult gaze out, the child's body and the pantomime of adult posture come together.  Little girls in harem outfits are not intrinsically disturbing, even in a world where the dress-ups chest has become a sinister Pandora's box.  These pictures aren't that either, they're just slightly off, they're displaced and at once lush and cold.

Polixeni Papapetrou creates worlds that, even as they are fantastic or contrived, are intensely affecting thanks to their colour.  The ability of pigment to effect us very directly is often overshadowed by the symbolism of colour, Papapetrou is better than that she has such an eye that images can hum or clatter with tonal washes and crashes. The sensual saturated colors reveal mental shadows and even that brightness has a sumptuary lasciviousness that scares us. The imagination and the senses are unruly, it's why they scare bigots and puritans of every stripe. A line of red in the piping around the pocket of a schoolgirl's blazer is so subversive it could be can enough to set off populist palpitations.  This subtle accretion of provocative detail loads each image with meaning, but it's the human presence that translates it into something meaningful.

Countless adaptations and retellings of Lewis Carroll's Alice books have never managed to erase the presence and power of the original's characters.  In her 'Wonderland' series of pictures Papapetrou creates tableaux from these books, built up with vivid stylized painted backgrounds and one or two figures.  The effect is charming but that shouldn't take away from how effective it is.  The Alice figure. Papapetrou's daughter Olympia is played straight, the girl poses with the just the right amount of seriousness and one can't help but note that she's not the classic blonde Alice but rather an intense dark haired girl who reminds us that this is a child playing a role.  The painted backdrops add are another link to the ideas of dress-ups and school plays, but their primary colouring and the just rough enough brushwork help retain an air of unreality.  These aren't just artless puns though, the interactions of girl and image are a crafted blur, in one the face of the Queen of Hearts oddly echoes that of Alice and you are left knowing it can't just be happy accident.  The girl playing a girl in a fantasy world, or even, a girl playing a girl playing past representations of that girl, in such a sombre way reminds us of the way that even our imagination is subject to complex mediation and also the serious business of fantasy.

The pretty constant presence of Papapetrou's daughter, the tenderness of some treatments of her and the strangeness of others, helps this body of work retain a personal dimension rather than disappear into structuralist rabbit holes or other theoretical cul-de-sacs.  As a model she is a still and deep centre to many of the images, so that the child characters she represents seem to have a flesh and blood presence whilst it is the set-ups and backdrops that swirl.  That centre allows the dominant conceit to develop, the odd, askew, loaded landscapes around the girl are representative of both her internal worlds and the lens through which others see her.  Without making the work specifically biographical we also watch this girl grow through the course of the retrospective Papapetrou follows this and themes shift and evolve.  It makes the images feel very intimate, like a conversation between two women full of care and fascination.

It looks like no accident that many of the images in the who touch on, explicitly or otherwise, the Victorian era when childhood was first romanticized. It's more remarkable that Papapetrou manages to use that era without creating some kind of photo essay. Measure of Papapetrou's craft is the affect she creates from an economy of means.  When we see girls in Victorian smocks fainting on stony outcrops in the Australian bush it's easy to see 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' and assume these are nothing but pastiche.  However, when one looks again it's plain to see that so much is achieved through subtle means.  In her series of works that explore tales of lost Australian children Papapetrou manages to touch on cultural archetypes and current anxieties, but her work is never dependent upon these contexts alone.  When the booted and bonneted children are replaced by sullen, modern teenagers  it's inevitable that we reconsider our assumptions.  Quaint historical children are in danger from something unknown, whilst messy warm-blooded contemporary kids are a threat to us.  If this makes the works sound like cultural studies lectures by other means I'm doing them a huge disservice as they work in their own right as beautifully balanced and composed frozen narratives without the interpretation.

Later works create fantastic characters, masked, role playing, part-human, part-animal they can be amusing or deeply moving and their protagonists have the presence of characters in fairy stories.  Folk tales have proved a ripe and fruitful source material for many female artists and writers, and Papapetrou works in some of the same spaces explored by Angela Carter in fiction, Marina Warner in popular cultural studies and Paula Rego in painting.  What all of these have in common is a sense of the danger and sex that rub up so insistently against female childhood.  The format of the folktale allows artists to apply the sane distance of metaphor to that subject, it allows us to escape the tabloid hysteria about bad girls just as it rejects the titillation that the same media thrives upon.  Whether hyper-real or stage set daubed you see something of the heady strangeness of childhood here. What is always notable is the impassive nature of the girls in the photographs, as all this weird shit happens it is almost a challenge to the adult viewer, and let us be honest they mainly will be, to deal with and process the ambiguity that suffuses childhood.

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 Men and Gods @ La Louvre

Great public galleries have a tendency to overwhelm in an a curious and inbuilt tension that pulls at odds against their purpose. The scale of the space and stone is formidable and all those cold panes of glass between paint and person or the shin high cordons that forbid us from the space around a work suggest us that, at best, we're unwelcome at worst a threat to the object itself. The tension is often most damaging to the greatest works, with all that security and all those other pictures we feel embarrassed to linger too long, lest we miss something else or fail to gaze with sufficient reverence. Well meaning galleries over-compensate by flooding the halls with themes and interpretations. It's a shame as it's just another obstacle between you and me and the painted image, those great and universal public assets that we all deserve to see. No art museum comes with a more powerful than the reformed palace of the Louvre.

Anywhere that holds the exquisite secular relic and global celebrity the Mona Lisa can't help but change our relationship to the building and the other objects in it. However it might just be that the sheer disproportionate volume of Leonardo's small work makes space and time for all sorts of other works. The Mona Lisa is a magnet for clamour and clatter (to the extent that I'm not going to even pretend to have really seen it in any meaningful way) but that noise has a sweet reverberation, it let's us linger, engage and indulge in front of La Joconde's Italian neighbours.

The stretch of the Louvre that shows Italian painters soar in what we now call the Renaissance has an oddly matter of fact brilliance. You walk through the high walls and wide corridors and again and again find something breathtaking. The lack of pomp for the vast majority of works is a great leveller, it makes them easier to see as paintings rather than price-tags or treasures. The comparison with what is happening in the works instructive for repeatedly we see artists take the sacred, awesome and ineffable and render it in human terms. The abundance of Christian imagery, the cast of now largely obscure saints and barely half familiar situations is Christianity can be a barrier to viewers today. The sense that special knowledge is needed to interpret painting has been promoted by historians and critics, whilst mainstream Christian imagery has become simpler, focussing on a benevolent Christ figure and the idea of personal salvation. Italian painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth belies this. There is a breadth of situation, character and imagery but the efforts of the artists to couch these in universal, if often extreme, experience makes access easy. It's just a question of looking.

Fra Angelico's massive altarpiece, 'The Coronation of The Virgin' is awash in gold and blue. The stepped construction, building up to Mary crowned by Christ, brings the eye upward but the first step brings us on to a familiar scene. A crowd is assembled, ostensibly made up of Saints, to bear witness to the coronation. On the bottom right two women (St Catherine with the wheel on which she is broken and St Agnes with her eponymous lamb) look on. More accurately the two women seem to share a confidence or remark on the scene. Whichever is the case it doesn't matter, in that small gesture Fran Angelico opens up the work to us, in giving two characters such an understated and quiet moment he has changed the scene. The moment of veneration is linked to private quiet contemplation and as that happens the scale shifts to one we can understand.

An innate quality of Christianity is the way, primarily using the figure of Christ, it negotiates the metaphysical questions that nag at sentient humans. Where art is at its best it considers, or aids in the consideration of similar questions: what it is to be conscious, how we can understand others or how we face our own mortality. Christianity does this through analogy even if we strip it of supernatural content. Art still looks for those analogies in colour and form but it is during the Renaissance when, in the service of Catholic patrons, artists attempted to evoke empathy through pictorial realism to explore those questions more directly. This evocative and empathetic approach is not necessarily the same as outright pictorial realism, even though many images from the period are uncannily photographic, but it does seek to create recognisable images that are more than totems. It lets us look at fiction and see ourselves.

Andrea Mantegna painted figures in sometimes strained perspectives that don't always work on paper or screen. His figures get described as 'sculptural' but of that's the case it's a rough and wise marble that forms such recognisably human figures. Standing below 'Saint Sebastian' it makes perfect sense, it's sculptural because a man is tied to the ruins of classical column. There are two faces that make all the points you need. Arrow pierced Sebastian looks to the sky, whilst his torso is classically perfect his lips are thin, pained and his eyes scared. That look is not just one of beatific resignation but it stumbles too with doubt and hopelessness. Look down again, to our level and the tanned and leathery archer feels fear too, confusion and disbelief make him turn and look for affirmation, for anything. The archer figure helps make us complicit and his confusion lifts him above a pantomime villain. This Sebastian can pulse with meaning for us because it isn't about the superhuman it's about the all too fallible. Doubt and fear capture us and Mantegna meticulously captures the familiar shock of unknowing.

'The Death of the Virgin' has less of the wizened muscular Roman lowlifes that make Caravaggio look like modern moody social realism but instead it creates a very intimate theatre. It's tall, and when you look up you realise that virtually nothing happens in almost the whol top half. Instead of action there is a blackness and the scarlet folds of a curtain, draped and hanging as a canopy over the scene below. Beneath this coagulated sky a study in the shapes and shades of bloody grief plays out around a stone white corpse in a red dress. Mary lies lifeless and next to her the Magdalen is folded and almost limp with grief. The static paint almost twitches with loss but without histrionics. The faceless figure in the corner provides an actor for us to cast as ourselves, without the mugging of the other characters it's easier for us to imagine the confused ache of grieving. That's perhaps when we look up again, and the swirl of red fabric feels like inchoate rage at the sudden absence of a life.

There might be a creative tension at work throughout the Renaissance, that between a supernatural God and the growing cult of the individual. Another way to look at it is that understanding the role of religion in helping us give form and substance to our own existential crises. This isn't a religion of assured personal salvation but simply one of people reaching out to one another through pigment in the dark and finding the empathic power of art. That's not to say that the work here is automatically transcendent or improving, but when we see the hesitance in the face of Bellini's virgin as she realises her son is bound for death we have the opportunity to reach out for others too. Whether mirrors or lenses the great works here are all full of doubt and frailty and fallibility and nothing could be more human.

On Nancy Spero @ Centre Pompidou

You can come to the work of Nancy Spero, shown here at Paris's Centre Pompidou in a posthumous retrospective with all sorts of biographical and ideological preconceptions. It's an enormous credit to an artist so easily identified with the pop-art, feminism, ant-war protest and all sorts of counter cultural reference that the visual and physical presence of Spero's work can stand outside and above the biography, theory and reportage and leave one quivering.

The work here spans almost fifty years, from dark washes of ink on paper in the late 1950's to encyclopaedic serigraphs created prior to Spero's death in 2009. There's a range of work here, mainly on paper, here spanning drawings, watercolours and prints, surrealism, abstraction, classical quotation, graphical and typography but throughout it is positively charged with a recognisable and common energy of line and colour. Everywhere you see the way that marks seem to have been made on the paper, in a kinetic blur or a with a slap of pigment but with an urgent assertion. It's this visual energy that makes Spero's urgent commitment far more than a lecture in ink and paint.

The earliest works here are dark monochrome smears, where people and words emerge in dark from an off white paper. In small drawings the figures might be the marks of features on a shroud or shadows seared into the walls of Pompeii. With a minimum of ink these lithographs look like memories, the men or women are isolated shapes on the paper that have been reduced down to the characteristics of totems. Across the same room and within four years the dark ink has filled the frame and figures seem to contort out of black smoke almost in the shapes of Blake's Job. Whether having figures pushing out of smoggy backgrounds or using a minimum of marks on the blank paper the common Spero characteristic is economy. Less happens than you might think, she just seems to make every stroke matter.

Part of the brilliance of this show is that is demonstrates how Spero takes on new stimulus, the media coverage of the Vietnam war or the poetry of Antonin Artaud, without ever losing her essential visual signature. The war pictures bring in harsh arbitrary shapes like the cross blades of the helicopter and we see human figures chewed and stripped to the bone, smeared with violent colour. People are tossed and ripped as if in rough Guernicas, twisted from the inside out and left motionless on piss-yellow washed backgrounds. Spero shows figures as if they were broken toy soldiers or the faceless repeated victims of conquest on triumphal Egyptian wall paintings. As she brings in these influences her economy of mark remains and adds to the impact of the paintings, the restraint prevents her from making war the spectacle that she abhors.

The war paintings also include explosive surrealist portraits of single figures that can remind you of Francis Bacon's contortions of Louise Bourgeois's genital surreality. Here Spero creates figures that might be Sumerian or Inca, disembodies heads that turn into sexual organs. Mouths spew blood and colour slashes and swirls and the overall effect are a series of aborted angels of death. Oddly at the end they remind you of Goya more than Spero's contemporaries. To be honest these pieces are far more effective than the text based works here. Slogans, no matter how you cut them up, lack the depth of great art. It's in these pieces is the most obviously a 'political' artist but they have the least ability to make us re-evaluate how we feel or to challenge us to action. The problem is a common one, politically motivated art tends to repeat a dogma and in doing so it loses the ability to connect in a human way.

The biggest work here, wrapped in three lines of large prints around three walls,'Azur', is a delirious archaeological montage. The individual images are like photocopies of artefacts, changing and degrading or the charcoal rubbings made of medieval funereal brasses, immediately they look like obsessive replication. But the lines of prints start to look like a fast cinematic montage and the juxtapositions and repetitions ask a question for every one they answer. It's not exactly analytical, but it looks like messy unresolved thought, the mind using images to wrestle with an idea. Intentionally or not they bring to mind patchwork quilts as much as radical collage. The colours are flashes almost like filters and throughout it is as if Spero has been playing with the combinations that visual culture offers us, cheesecake women come in cold blues while ancient sculpture pulses in technicolour. The persistence of the technique reminds us of its craft just as the quilt does, but it also suggests that nothing is fixed, that re-evaluation is an imperative and that we must question and question and question what we see.

The repeated printed image makes for visual poetry and punnery too. In 'Relay' Spero takes a classical Greek image of a woman running and repeats it, inverts it, reverses it, overlays it with colour and scratching and swathing it with colour. The effect (reminding us of the circularity of painting around a vase) is something both glorious and futile. This woman crosses colour and time, passing on something without ever reaching a finishing line. Ambiguity gives the piece depth but also helps show us how Spero's wok can be committed and ideological whilst still retaining an essential humanity and empathy. The answer to centuries of women not controlling the representation of their own image is for women to ceaselessly make images, not to simply state the issue and sit back in ideological smugness. Thats sense of vital imperative makes these works feel essential and timely.

Certain pieces of art come loaded with layers of reference, historical borrowings that weigh down the work and put the viewer in their place. It is as if we are being told "If you understand all of these things you might just be worthy to pass judgement on me". Others works tap into the vein of memory that pulses through our culture using the images that transmit and translate our shared experience, letting them bring their deep currents and seismic presence without hectoring the viewer with erudition. Spero's best work (and that's most of it_ transcends agit-prop and simple conceptual posturing. Wit and anger and movement and ambiguity make these works personally political and implicate the viewer. Feminism in art needs urgent powerful voices but too often gender studies ideology breeds sterile jargon (as does any ideology) and forgets that blood and skin and breath and tears and doubt and death are universal and that great art starts with there. Nancy Spero knew that and it's that heartbeat that survives her so wonderfully.

On Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life @ MCA

There can be something unintentionally hilarious about a retrospective show. The museum or gallery bestows its aura upon an artist whose body of work is brought together with hushed thematic reverence. But then, when we see it all together the volume and repetition poke us in the ribs and remind us that it isn't very good at all. Actually, it's a bit ridiculous. Well this is what's happening at Sydney's MCA with the international touring show 'Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life'. Across the space of the museum's third floor we're reminded that there's nothing as funny as that pompous middlebrow middle-ground where art, celebrity and advertising meet in a smug vacuum.

There isn't that much of Leibovitz's big set piece baroque fantasies here. The tone is serious, at least in a kind of 'look at me I'm being serious' way. There is some of the lush art direction that has sucked in the stylistic traits of the perfume and couture advertisers that these pictures appear alongside but that's mainly confined to a single room. Instead there's a more or less chronological run through 15 years of sombre yet portentous portraiture, family snapshots and massive overblown landscapes. The chronological hang is a very mixed blessing. It gives a narrative strand to the photographer's family photos but it also means that early on you walk into a room and are struck by how massively derivative so much of the work is. So when she's with dancers on a beach you see Herb Ritts, big landscapes are photocopies of Ansel Adams, photos of US Olympians could have been taken by Leni Riefenstahl and art and grit intrudes with impersonations of Nan Goldin.

There is a candy-like feel to a lot of this work. There is undeniable pleasure as Queen Elizabeth look like she's more 'Lord of The Rings' than 'Monarch of the Glen', The White Stripes get all the kooky bohemian signifiers as the circus and 'A Clockwork Orange' intersect and Cindy Crawford is a gorgeously fleshy Cranach. But you can't help thinking that it's not very good for you, that all those layers of visual sugar don't actually add any depth. The more you look the shallower it gets and the more you realise each hint of insight and intelligence is a stylistic trope a signpost for 'clever', 'smart' or 'deep' that never takes you to the place itself.

There's an awful lot of cant talked about how Leibovitz captures her some essential humanity in her work better than some other portrait photographers. It's a claim I find curious. Repeatedly you see in these images the trademarks of a flattened depth of field and an almost hyper-real colour saturation, it's a striking signature and an effect that breaks many portrait conventions. However it also has a distancing effect the image is an Annie Leibovitz style portrait ,with all its ticks and tricks rather than some window onto the soul. Where there is a depth it's in the layers of irony, intended and otherwise, that attend each of the celebrity portraits. The notion that celebrities (whether models, artists, actors or politicians) are somehow closed books who the photographer opens with an insightful lens is pretty flawed. For some years the trajectory of celebrity image making has shot toward a place where flaws are as much a currency as glamour was in pre-war Hollywood. The majority these set-piece shots aren't stars stripped of their varnish with some naked candour, they're just as contrived as the airbrushed perfection of Hollywood gone by, but this time they're in the modern celebrity idiom of therapy culture, where a flaw or two gives a gives perspective to our true fabulousness.

Just like Hollywood stars hamming it in arthouse vanity cameos Leibovitz appropriates some of the signifiers of 'Art' here. It feels like an attempt to claim the spurious gravitas necessary to justify museum wallspace (assuming that celebrity pulling power on its own isn't enough). This the enlargements of these prints are messy at the edges, suggesting the sweat and toil of the atelier. Most strikingly the landscapes are massive wall sized slabs of black and white. Massive art need to be questioned for its motives. Scale has a pummeling effect on the viewer, it thunders self-importance and for that very reason it demands greater scrutiny. In this case the size of the images shouts louder than the content, the essential message is "I must be important art, because YOU can't print anything this big!"

Death and personal suffering have a tendency to neutralize objective criticism. The chronological seam of the show is sown with the thread of Leibovitz's relationship with her lover Susan Sontag, finishing in her decline and death. Biographically I have no doubt that it's interesting but artistically it feels like little more than a scrapbook. Formally most are presented as black and white snaps, some are quite beautiful, others quite mundane. Either way one cannot help wonder whether they would be of any intrinsic interest if they didn't have Sontag as their subject. The final image, and the one that sticks, is of Sontag's dead body laid out. It is composed of printed a number of frames that have been patched together, at once there's a touch of polyptych, death mask and tomb sculpture.

The Sontag photographs highlight a wider problem here. Plenty of minor artists have documented the the lives of titans, but they remain footnotes in the histories. Leibovitz works in and around the public culture of celebrity and on the edge of another culture of America's public intellectuals, I'm sure it makes for a great dinner party but it doesn't make her an artist of any significance. What you get instead is a kind of middlebrow paparazzi effect where a profusion of 'serious' (let's assume that taking oneself very seriously like the profusion of method actors here suffices to deserve that description) contemporary cultural figures lend some kind of minor cachet and allow viewers to tick a list of the recognisable great and good.

It's dangerous to equate artistic merit to subject matter, that's a criteria for photojournalism, but the single most striking image of the show is one of shocking reportage. 'Traces of the massacre of Tutsi schoolchildren and villagers on a bathroom wall, Shangi Mission School Rwanda' is as brutally sad as it is simple. The smears of bloodies hand prints, red caking into brown, hint at something almost unimaginable. The flatness and colour saturation work here. The yellow walls have a crime scene starkness and the lack of context is disorienting. The crop of the picture leaves you wondering is you see a wall or a floor or what the sheer amount of blood must mean, the lack of compass is a perfect visceral response to horror.

Perhaps it's the celebrity thing. The fact that I just don't care how well she's caught people acting out a public image. But there's also a feeling that Leibovitz is a celebrity photographer who photographs celebrities and if she wasn't this work wouldn't be be here. Other people's oddly cropped holiday snaps wouldn't merit hanging on a gallery wall nor would a series of derivative student-like experiments in art photohgraphy. Which makes me question which value system the gallery has bought into by staging the exhibition (although the fifteen dollar entrance fee pretty much answers that question for me). It's shame something so glossy and dumb should take up so much space and time in one of Sydney's few large scale art fora. You can call me snob but I really need something more than a middlebrow 'Where's Wally?' from the MCA.

Dagmar Cyrulla @ James Makin Gallery

Dagmar Cyrulla’s paintings, showing at Melbourne's James Makin Gallery, seem to bear witness to humanity at its most characteristically vulnerable. It’s entirely fitting that, when we look at her quiet suburban narratives we wonder: about what has occurred; what might be about to happen; what we should feel for the protagonists. She captures that most essential element of the human condition. Doubt.

We humans are uncertain of our futures, about one another’s motives and about whether seeing really is believing. Cyrulla’s paintings are sometimes fragile strokes that try to piece together things we can’t understand, her brushstrokes are the like the smear of recall, the half remembered last whereabouts of the victim. At times they feel like crime scene reconstructions, at others they are memories of the moment just before we couldn’t go back. Then again the works might also be dispassionate reportage on the banalities of every day life. That uncertainty of intent makes them compelling.

These paintings feature adults and children reduced to their essentials. Clothes give little away, décor is functional, props are rarely more than vases of flowers. Yet amongst this a hand might be about to form a plea or a fist, a wet red smear of lip might be smiling and from that gesture alone the whole canvass is imbued with a sense of import. Cyrulla shows action and reaction rather than cause and effect, in doing so she presents characters whose own existential crises remain hidden. That alone engages us with the paintings in a powerful way, we look at the human and project our own experience. These are ambiguous scenes depicted ambiguously, they sometimes feel illicit, often powerfully sexual, but again and again those responses are magnified because of our own uncertainty. Most of the action in these paintings takes place in our own minds, which is why they are so very memorable.

Ambiguity keeps Cyrulla on the right side of voyeurism. We may be watching a woman dressing after an afternoon tryst with a lover, or we might not. If the circumstances were more explicit we would be plunged into judgement. Instead the uncertainty reminds us of the frailty of human experience, of the difficulty of our own decisions and desires. Cyrulla manages to give us a tender distance that manages to retain both complexity and emotion.

At first sight Cyrulla’s painting brings to mind the work of Eric Fischl, the American artist whose suburbs and hotel rooms present a sleazier voyeuristic update of Edward Hopper. The comparison falls when you see the amount of cultural baggage Fischl loads his paintings with, they are much closer to a closed meaning that the work here. If Fischl’s work has a writerly analogue it’s Bret Easton-Ellis if Cyrulla does it’s Raymond Carver. The moment captured in Cyrulla’s work often hangs like a non-sequitur and it’s no surprise that she evokes literary precedents. There’s something of the spareness of Carver in there, her economy of palate reminds one of his sentences. There’s no rush to sneer or judge as people are on the verge of the banal, the cruel or the mistaken. The careful and considered tonal palate stops things straying into sensationalism. It’s a rare thing in any art form to present humanity without the hysteria, a rare and worthy thing.

It is easier to be reminded of Degas precision in framing meaning or the tender colour blocks of Bonnard’s obsessive repainting of his wife as she bathed. In both cases, as with Cyrulla, the impression left is far stronger than the specifics recorded on the canvass. Cyrulla’s hidden eyes, smudged skin and mid-air gestures show rather than tell, this makes the work powerful as it invites rather than dictates response. In terms of art criticism both Degas and Bonnard tend to be noted for their formal qualities, but for the general viewer their popularity comes from a link between that and their human content. Like both of these Cyrulla captures the fleshiness and the ineffable spirit of the human through a style that favours impression over precision. We look at her paintings and feel them, as we see she understands that we are all messy, imprecise, flawed creatures in search of meaning and respect.

The characters in the paintings inhabit unsettling psychic environments. Doors and windows feature heavily with all their intimations of parting and arrival, voyeurism and display. The interiors are not overly symbolic or detailed, they take on character through colour. Kitchens are reduced to tobacco wood smears and carpets swirl dizzily beneath our feet. Showhome interiors become faintly nauseous with touches of green and yellow so that sometimes the events might be taking place underwater, with all the struggle and inevitability of drowning.

It’s erroneous to imagine that dramas are always played out in the shadows in a land of vast blue skies, the cruel light of day bears witness to as many pivotal moments. Cyrulla’s use of light can be shocking, the harsh whitening blues of the summer sun make her feel a very Australian painter. It is also the naturalism, and often softness, of the light that adds emotional depth to the paintings, they create real spaces rather than noirish film sets.

Cyrulla’s characters retain the dignity of mystery. They are not painted to the point of photo-realism nor are they loaded up with cultural signifiers that signpost a particular lifestyle. The wonder and danger of painting is that it can tell us too much about its subject, a problem that often pushes contemporary narrative painting into kitsch. The painter here understands that it is precisely our inability to know one another that fascinates, that the fact that we rarely give out our all to the world is the essence of human drama. There is something respectful in the way that Cyrulla handles characters by showing us only their essentials she allows them to keep hold of themselves.

The best art will always find a relationship between form, what’s on the canvass, and narrative, what’s in our minds. Dagmar Cyrulla paints profound things with a restraint that we can all recognise. It’s the restraint of survival and coping, of getting on with it, of human beings living. In these paintings Cyrulla has created something touching and universal.