Reece King’s exhibition The Ogee & Manaia, at the Hocken Library until 1st August, is big and busy and bustling and painterly. It’s a lot of fun. The works all gesture invitingly towards representation, but never quite get there. They invite interpretation. There’s a lot of everything: colour, shape, canvas, line. Some of the paintings look as if they might just have been pieces of graffiti on a stretch of city concrete, and then another look cancels the thought and they seem elegant, poised, ready. It’s exhuberant. It’s so much.

And what a title! A manaia, in Tina Makereti’s words, is a human form but one “going between the earthly and the spirit forms”. It’s a “figure of transformation and communication”. And as for the ogee . . . Chambers glosses it as “an S-shaped curve or line”. The OED has it as “an arch whose curve is formed by two S-shaped or double curves meeting at its apex” (it’s a word more than 700 years old). __Ogee __was the name of the doomed style magazine Nick Guest and Wani Ouradi worked on in Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Nick felt that it was time for a new Analysis of Beauty as he traced the bend along his lover’s back. Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty mentions the ogee as “entirely composed of waving lines”. Oh Gee! OMG. Is King the O.G.?