Art in Motion: Lithographs and Tempera Paintings by Hans Erni. Foyer of the Hongkong Cultural Centre until March 19. Brazil Through its Artists. Foreign Correspondents' Club until March 20 IT would be more accurate to name Hans Erni's exhibition Motion in Art, for it is the subjects - sportsmen and sportswomen - whose athletic movements he tries to capture in accomplished tempera and lithography which are moving.
The effects are partly achieved by the depiction of the athletes running, jumping, and otherwise strenuously exerting themselves; and partly by superimposing the figures and by a cunning system of lines providing a dynamic grid in which the compositions are set like prawns in aspic.
The inspiration for the figures is the romantic idealising of classical Greek sculpture made more physically ideal by a fluidity of drawn line and realistically modelled musculature. The results are in line with the dreams of advertising men and corporations with large walls to cover innocuously with pleasing scenes.
The earlier (1960s and 1970s) work is more telling in both drawing and colour, and more vital - attributes that have turned to the slick, perhaps because of the sheer virtuosity of Erni's line.
The image of Brazil presented by painters in the Foreign Correspondents' Club show is one filtered (and dampened down) by their use of the naive approach of amateurs, when in fact they are trained artists.
The results are far from the intuitive character of real naive art and display a kind of false, forced charm.
