Gimblett is best when the compositions are simple with dramatic power. Yet, there are very few of those here. The focused energy has got lost because he has used too many colours and too many layers of overlapping painted marks. Mixing traditional Japanese calligraphy (as he usually does) with an airier version of de Kooning’s interwoven but floating, push-and-pulling brush application, doesn’t gel. And where he has used a Pollock-style dribbled line (white on black) the linear shapes are too anaemic and flabby, lacking muscle.

To enjoy this installation, you don’t need an underlying narrative; it works so well formally with many interconnecting parallel levels. The show has an appealing airy, linear quality that repudiates weighty density - a lightness of touch. Yet there clearly is a theme behind this arrangement of various elements - that of global and ecological issues. It is conventional subject matter for sure but it is done with considerable inventiveness and panache.

Looking at it slightly from one side, and not frontally, the work seems like a synthesis between Kenneth Snelson and the Russian Constructivist el Lissitsky in the way it explores temporary methods of creating tension for holding forms in place. However, in a reflexive sense, the elastic can be interpreted as a trope for the supportive mechanisms within the artworld that operate behind each show, those connecting social structures that enable the work to be seen and taken seriously.

I like to see an artist admit he hates his audience, and tell them so. Yet even beyond such love-hate ambivalences (after all he is trying to make them laugh) the tumescence theme is intriguing as a comment on dualism. It spot-lights that simple, apparently causal connection between thinking Thought A, and generating Bodily Response B that all growing boys love to discover.

We have here one of the most amazing pieces of public art Auckland has seen for a long time… On one level this is a bizarre pun on art world accessibility, on the desire for comprehension on the part of the public, and the need for exposure on the part of the artist. However visually it is complex; but easy to grasp - and even enthralling with its wit.

McWhannell’s real interest here is the falling of light on flesh and fabric, and how he can orchestrate pools of glowing lumination. The trouble is that some of the poses are so tediously dull their banality distracts - it takes you away from this interest. The long legged sitters are so demurely ‘feminine’ that their ordinariness, and the conventional frontal placement of the sofa, repels you.

Jäger is a particularly interesting painter. In the past he was worked on the back of sheets of glass and arranged his marks of thin paint in floating clumps. I like the awkwardness of these page paintings (painted drawings, perhaps, is more accurate). Their lopsidedness gives them a Gustonesque vulnerability. They are not too sweet, they have a raw earthy colouration, and their wonky tottering quality is not contrived.