"Despite the title, Sienna Palette, the Paintings by Mark Cross at the Pierre Peeters Gallery are tightly governed by the concern for a magic realism. One part is given over to landscapes such as Dry Gulch where the brown of folding hills seems to be a darker version of the prevailing drought.

"The realism goes further than that, inviting speculation without being explicit. Cross has done a number of paintings based on the rocky landscape of Niue.

" His virtuoso realism comes into play in representing rippling transparent water. A notable example is Swimming in Cyan Champaign, where a woman swims in deep blue water with the surface above her, very cleverly realised. The Tuna Years shows a young woman sitting on rocks looking at the ripples on the clear water with a glass buoy in netting floating clear in the water. We can only speculate that this has floated clear from a tuna boat offshore.

" Not all the work has this layering of meaning. Some is simply illustrational. Yet one uncomplicated painting, which shows the head of a thoughtful bearded man alone on a wide sea with an infinite horizon beyond him, has a symbolic force that encourages speculation about him and what looms beyond that horizon"