» View The Attraction of Opposites exhibition

NOTHING MIGHT SEEM easier than for an artist to paint every picture in black on a stark white canvas. For British painter John Virtue (b. 1947), this has been his method for some 20 years. It has also been the method of many generations of Zen brush and ink painters and of abstract expressionists such as Franz Kline and Pierre Soulages. But Virtue, despite the abstract dimension in his work, remains a landscape painter.

Virtue's works have an intensity that will seduce some viewers and disturb others. There is no room for humour or irony in pictures that wear their black-and-white palette like a badge of purity. It is coincidental that while Virtue is showing at Annandale Galleries, in the nearby suburb of Rozelle one of the supreme ironists of world art may be sampled at Sydney College of the Arts Gallery.

Germany's Sigmar Polke (b. 1941) has risen to such starry heights over the past decade that every time I'm confronted with one of his pictures I feel a sense of unreality. Unlike his countryman Anselm Kiefer, soon to be the subject of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, Polke's offhand manner lends his work an air of frivolity. He blends so many styles and approaches that it is pointless looking for an underlying program. A typical Polke, if there is such a thing, has both abstract and figurative elements. Images may be appropriated from many different sources, with repetitive motifs drawn in freehand over the loosest splashes of paint.

The result is an oeuvre that seems to have no beginning and no end, no sense of evolution, no respect or reverence for any form of convention. In the catalogue accompanying this show, Bice Curiger argues that a work by Polke may live and breathe limitlessness - a good characteris-ation of an art that is as shapeless as it is successful.

Putting Polke alongside Virtue is an either-or proposition. They are polar opposites, both artistically and temperamentally. Whereas Virtue has purposefully stripped away every element in his art that distracts from the singularity of his vision, Polke is like a gigantic vacuum cleaner that sucks in every bit of pop cultural trash and mixes it, promiscuously, with images drawn from fine art and recent history. Virtue is a believer in the grand traditions of painting, whose work owes an obvious debt to artists such as Constable and Turner. Polke is an iconoclast who views high art, advertising imagery, cartoons, photographs and illustrations as part of the same continuum.

Polke recognises no boundaries; Virtue is a painter who sets severe limitations on himself. In 1978 he destroyed much of his life's work - a tactic that is surprisingly common among artists. Most of us might imagine that anything an artist does may turn out to be valuable and should therefore be preserved. From the art historian's perspective, an artist's juvenilia and failed works are a fascinating source of insights. Yet the artist himself has a different point of view: those early efforts and failures are a constant reproach - souvenirs of immaturity and confusion that have to be expunged from the face of the Earth. For some artists it is their worst nightmare to imagine a curator staging a posthumous exhibition of early work.

This is the case even for an artist such as Gareth Sansom who, with his anarchic taste in styles and imagery, is probably Australia's closest equivalent to Polke. It is hard, though, to imagine Polke worrying about such matters. He has been a dedicated game-player since the 1960s, when he was already mixing up his styles in direct opposition to the temper of the times. He has never been one thing or another and has taken an obvious delight in eluding categorisation.

This remained the case at least until the late 1970s, when post-modernism began its brief transit through the world of international art. Suddenly nobody believed in the great, time-honoured truths of art any more. The museums and galleries were awash with irony, while every rising star was appropriating images and mixing styles. The zeitgeist had caught up with Polke, who stood revealed as a prophet and precursor. From being an artist who showed his contempt for master narratives and masterpieces, he was now viewed as a master in his own right. Major museums scrambled to host his exhibitions and acquire his works.

The Art Gallery of NSW belatedly joined the queue and acquired the painting Meteor II (1988) in 2004. By this stage Polke's prices were astronomical and his best works were in the possession of museums and big-time private collectors. Meteor II is horribly nondescript but this could be said about most of Polke's output. So why was it necessary to acquire a Polke painting? I suppose it allows us to see how much Australian artists such as Dale Frank owe to his example but, in terms of lessons paid for with public funds, this was much more expensive and less useful than Amanda Vanstone's Chinese tutorials.

The 40 gouaches in Music From an Unknown Source were all made in 1996 and form a brief anthology of Polke's preoccupations and favourite motifs.

There is, for example, the outline of a watch-tower from a concentration camp in No. 11: Left, right - which way should the Federal eagle look? This image is also found in a much-reproduced painting and is often used to argue that Polke's work contains an implicit political critique of modern Germany. We are reminded that the phantoms of Nazism lurk within that undergrowth of drips, dribbles and inane imagery.

In other words, we are assured that Polke can take on all the myths and verities of art but still convey a serious message. In some ways his entire back-catalogue may be seen as a gloss on T.W. Adorno's famous claim that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Polke's post-Holocaust tactic has been to pursue a deliberately non-poetic art - a form of shredded baroque, to borrow a phrase from Curiger's essay. All the trademarks of modern art, including action painting, collage, assemblage and appropriation, have been pressed into service to create an art that defies logic and common sense. In doing so, Polke alerts us to the dangers that hide within our own habitual desire for political solutions, easy explanations and cut-and-dried values.

I can acknowledge the theory, but - as usual - it sounds so much better when one is not looking at the works. When Curiger wants to make a case for the beauty and exuberance of Polke's gouaches, it sits oddly with their shambolic appearance. It seems that for some critics, doodles + theory = high art. Even in subverting conventional ideas about beauty, a new beauty has to be born. The main difference is that to uninitiated eyes this new beauty may look like an ugly mess.

To return to Virtue's black-and-white paintings of the Thames and the London skyline is like stepping back into the old master rooms of the National Gallery. Polke's titles are larger and madder than most of his paintings; Virtue calls every single work "Landscape". He makes no pretence to any metaphysical meanings or symbolism. The drama of these pictures is all contained within the collisions of black and white and the textures of acrylic paint, black ink and shellac.

Virtue is reminiscent of the artist in an essay by Oliver Sacks who loses his colour vision after sustaining a head injury in a car accident. The unnamed painter doesn't simply go colour-blind but begins to see the world as if it were a black-and-white photocopy. As with that painter, Virtue eliminates extraneous detail in favour of silhouettes and dark, sooty shadows, as if he mistrusted the pleasures of the senses.

Virtue, although he stares long and intently at the motif, does not simply paint what he sees. The small drawings included in this exhibition show how he cuts up his working sketches and collages them together to give more compressed and dynamic views of London. There is an undeniable grandeur in this work, especially in the largest, Landscape No. 710 (2003-04).

Unlike Polke, Virtue makes no demands on the viewer's patience or credulity. To appreciate the former, one has to share in a kind of unspoken joke and there are plenty who giggle reflexively without the least understanding. But Virtue's paintings are not puzzles to be deciphered. His shadows may be dark but they are not so obscure as even the thinnest wash of the German's irony. In Polke's terms, Virtue would probably pass as a true believer in many of the abiding myths of painting but it could be argued that some myths are essential to the maintenance of life.

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