We are often told that the constant flood of ghoulish news media imagery has effected our sense of sensitivity to the extent that we are relatively immune to the plight of the weak and exploited of the world.  There certainly seems to be no end to the genocidal waves which wash across our television screens.

And yet, when the hustings of the television have died down for the night we still have to live with ourselves.  It is in those dark, still moments that art can most effectively insert itself into our beleaguered brains.  For this reason, many will choose Matisse's sort of art, an art that, as he said, is just like an old comfortable armchair.

Greenhill Galleries, like all the best galleries, certainly offers access to that kind of visual comfort, but, as with a handful of other galleries, it also offers the opportunity of a much tougher kind of art which can invade our quiet contemplative moments.

The choice of George Gittoes as the Festival exhibition for this gallery is both commercially brave as well as totally responsible.  For this is an exhibition that is far and away one of the most significant shows of the year.

Gittoes is frequently thought of as a war artist, as indeed hi is, but he goes far beyond the mere detailing of human kind's nastiness.  he produces an art that disturbs but it is an art that has the potential to redefine.

Make no mistake about it, this exhibition will disturb you.  Start reading the text surrounding his drawings and you will be appalled by the narrative.  The tragic maimed beggars, the stories of explosive devices which are created especially to blind young children rather than kill them, which might be the kinder act, of torture and of unspeakable planned cruelty.

Although the paintings, many of which are illustrated in a new book on Gittoes, are powerful and magnetic, it is the drawings exhibited downstairs which are the most powerful works in this show of very powerful works.

I was looking at some highly finished drawings by a much celebrated local WA artist, apparently renowned as a draftsman, and I thought how easy it is to mistake mannered recipe based drawings for good drawing based on hard looking and deep emotion.  Gittoes's drawings take the work and the image, the gesture and the meaning, and they turn the mixture into a potent source for immediate emotional sensation.  The act of drawing and painting well is a struggle.

Gittoes shows that the most simple of artistic means, for pencil or the tube of oil paint, can be as effective as any of the more technologically advanced art making processes.

In Gavin Fry's excellent new book on George Gittoes, the artist is credited with saying, "My art reflects the mass human struggles and the state of individuals at the end of this century - it is in these seemingly unresolved states of political imbalance that I isolate the individual experience.  It is where the disempowered face destruction and death, where the individual human spirit is pushed to its essence."

Don't miss this remarkable exhibition by an artist who, although recognised as a documentary photographer and film maker, still believes and proves that a tube of oil paint in the hand can make meaningful art that will shake your soul.