VISUAL ARTS:DAVID KIELY, whose paintings are showing at the Lemonstreet Gallery, is from Cork and a graduate of the Crawford College there, though he is based now in England. His work is representational and, like a great deal of contemporary painting, based primarily on photographs.
He also cites sketches as sources, but the overwhelming impression is of the use of optical effects that are specifically photographic, including foreshortening, cropping and a shallow depth of field.
Rather than using images from other sources - another common practice - he works from his own photographs and drawings, looking to his immediate surroundings and the places he visits.
Recurrently, foreground detail comes between the viewer and a scene beyond. Often the branches of a tree or a shrub, perhaps dotted with blossom, occupy the foreground, making a tracery through which we view a more vaguely indicated piece of landscape, whether mundanely urban or rural or mountainous. Colour and tonality are muted, as though there is a mist or a haze; indeed, there does literally seem to be in the largest painting, Flag Pole, which features a pole against a mist-shrouded cliff face. It's one of the best paintings in the show, audacious in its subtlety and charged with an air of mystery.
Because we look through a foreground screen of one kind or another, the paintings situate us as observers, standing apart and surveying a space of one kind or another. This device could be taken as a metaphor for representational painting itself. It could also have slightly more disturbing implications, yet on the whole Kiely doesn't seek to instil a sense of menace. The mood of the work is more reflective and contemplative.
Kiley is a very capable painter and several of the works in the show are outstanding, including Wild Mountainand Little Hill.
THE MOST COMPELLING piece in Nonknowledge, a good group exhibition at the Project Arts Centre, is Joachim Koester's The Morning of the Magicians, an account, in images and words, of his excursion to Cefalù in Sicily. He was searching for a house that was occupied by the occultist, Aleister Crowley, in the early 1920s. At first, wandering through the hilly landscape by gated communities and a sports stadium, he didn't think he would be able to find it and that it might have been demolished to make way for one of the many new dwellings. Then he happened upon the building, in a state of dereliction, screened by a mass of overgrown vegetation.
The house was Crowley's Abbey of Thelema, an occult headquarters for Crowley and his followers, of which there weren't that many, not surprisingly given that, Koester relates, conditions in the "abbey" were squalid in the extreme.
Crowley imposed a strict regimen on his followers while indulging himself in every form of excess he could imagine. Within a couple of years, the cult was evicted following a public outcry over the dubious goings-on, which included drug-taking, black magic and sexual rituals. Frescoes painted on the walls were whitewashed over, though experimental film-maker Kenneth Anger restored them in the 1950s as part of a film project that was either never completed or has since been lost without trace.
Koester's photographs of the area and the house, both outside and inside (he climbed in through the one window not blocked up), are fascinating. They are straightforward images, but they document a strange piece of cultural history. Alas, the frescoes, on the fragmentary evidence of what survives, do not look interesting in themselves at all, and appear crude and rushed - but then, that's not particularly the point.
Nonknowledgerefers to Georges Bataille's idea of looking deep into any proposition and finding an ultimate uncertainty that "makes us uneasy". None of the other pieces in the show have quite the cogency of Koester's work, but they are all interesting.
It's hard to know how to take Artur Zmijewski's Singing Lessons, in which a choir of deaf teenagers tries to sing Bach and a Huntington's Disease sufferer recites sonnets by Shakespeare. It makes for intriguing but uneasy listening.
Lee Welch (whose solo show is currently running at the Lab on Foley Street) and Tine Melzer both show slight but conceptually neat pieces based on literary game-playing. Matthew Buckingham's slide projection hinges on a strong back-story. That leaves Maaike Schoorel's painting, "like the hum of white noise", inviting us to look deeper and deeper.
AT GORMLEYS FINE ART, Peter Monaghan's Redemption Songsis a remarkable exhibition. At first glance, his meticulously made three-dimensional abstracts come across as retro in the way they revisit some of the concerns and forms of Op Art, as seen recently in Donegal's Vasarely retrospective.
Monaghan makes intricately patterned, rhythmic compositions with incredibly dense sequences of coloured, curved ribs. Everything is precisely calculated and impeccably executed. An element of movement is provided by the viewer, as when one moves across the front of any of the pieces, it changes, shifting smoothly and then abruptly into another colour register.
It could be just a tiresome effect, but Monaghan handles it brilliantly, devising beautiful chromatic harmonies and flowing patterns that bring music to mind, perhaps the minimalism of Philip Glass. Blocks of repeated elements almost disguise subtle modulations that then take us by surprise.
The presentation of such work is a bit of a problem. Many pieces are framed in box-like rectangles, and they are okay, but some seem constrained in a conventional pictorial format.
Boldly, though, a terrific series of circular Songs are mounted in circular Perspex boxes, and they work incredibly well. They are amazing objects that almost shouldn't work, but do.
• David Kiely: New Paintings, Lemonstreet Gallery, 24-26 City Quay, Dublin 2, until Oct 3; Nonknowledge, Matthew Buckingham, Joachim Koester, Benoit Maire, Tine Melzer, Maaike Schoore, Lee Welch and Artur Zmijewski, Project Arts Centre, 39 East Essex Street, Dublin 2, until Oct 11; Redemption Songs, Peter Monaghan. Gormleys Fine Art, 24 South Frederick Street, Dublin 2, until Oct 2
