Reviewed
Sub-Sea, Land & Water, Solomon Gallery ends today (01-6794237)
Pop, Temple Bar Gallery until Aug 3 (01-6710073)
Half an Hour of Silence, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until July 28 (01-8740064)
Greta McMahon and Gavin Hogg, Ashford Gallery until July 26 (01-6612558, ext 104)
Three Sculptors, Cross Gallery until July 28 (01-4738978)
One of Jennifer Kingston's achievements in her fine exhibition at the Solomon Gallery is to link old and new technologies in a beautiful synthesis. The show's title, Sub-Sea, Land & Water, sounds a bit vague but, in the event, accurately reflects what she is trying to do, which is something quite ambitious. That is, broadly speaking, to approach a subject from a variety of different perspectives, but as though in the space of a continuous journey, so that we are transported from a high, airborne vantage point to deep beneath the surface of the water.
The longest views are expansive airborne ones of estuary and archipelago. They could be based on satellite images, but this hi-tech source is filtered through distinctly old-tech skills of handmade paper and fabric dyeing (together with the use of pastel). This distinctive method allows Kingston great scope for rich textural and colour effects, which she exploits with relish. The result is a dazzling series of unorthodox landscapes suffused with the warm colours of balmy climes.
On the whole she is most comfortable far out from the earth's surface or underneath the water. Within a conventional format she is more uneasy, although the small Shore in Moonlight is a strikingly good little piece. Her study of furious white water in High Tide is less convincing, but clearly has its place in the rationale of the show. Once beneath the waves - and the source is her experience of scuba-diving - she delivers a series of spirited, exotic, hectically worked, other-worldly visions with great verve, vividly conveying the excitement of the moment.
The show has the feeling of being considered, a long time in the making, and its varied ingenious strategies make up an impressively cohesive whole.
Some of Adrian Gollner's chameleon work in his exhibition Pop seems almost out of place in Temple Bar Gallery - or in any gallery. So carefully does it blend into a series of notional contexts that it then goes on to subvert, that to situate it in an art gallery, where anything goes, can rob it of its satirical point. This is the case with the fairly broad, sarcastic humour of his True Advertising Series.
Something much more interesting happens with his framed colour sample series of discontinued Winsor & Newton Artists' Oil Colours. It's the "discontinued" that gives this work, which comes on as a parody of straight, hard-edge abstract painting, a certain resonance and ambivalence. Gollner, a Canadian who grew up on military bases in Germany, has acquired an odd combination of interests along the way, from the utopian projections of the advertising industry to Cold War anxieties, plus an anorak's fascination with fighter aircraft insignia and comparable collections. It could be that his array of boldly coloured airforce decals, which make a very good, decorative painting installation, point to the ideological agendas and assumptions that underlie notionally value-free aesthetics, but he doesn't force the point. It is, overall, a very enjoyable show.
David Quinn, in Half an Hour of Silence, pursues the exceptionally pared down representational idiom that we first saw employed in the work in his previous show.
The terrain remains pretty much the same: a verdant, rural setting in which buildings and vegetation are rendered with a schematic, toy-like simplicity. It could be bland and lifeless, and the motif of the shed with its rusted corrugated-iron roof is overworked, but the pictures are cleverly animated by the glow of what looks like a raking, evening light (except for the equally effective cold, lunar glow of Eclipse. A very simple view of a bale in a field is surprisingly atmospheric, but the revelation of the show is the one figure painting, which works so well that Quinn will surely be prompted to follow its lead.
Gavin Hogg and Greta McMahon made up a two-hander at the Ashford Gallery. Hogg's grid-based abstracts refer in a relaxed way to crossword puzzles, board games, city grids and other systems. He has a distinctive colour sense, leaning towards deep purples enlivened by flashes of near complementaries, and he builds up textural masses of pigment that play against the rigidity of the underlying grid quite effectively. McMahon's work has a casual quality, which is not to say that it is casually made. But it does come across as being not quite there, as being too lax, particularly on a larger scale.
The highlight of the three-person sculpture show at the Cross Gallery is undoubtedly Laurent Mellet's life-size male figure with a head that periodically bursts into spectacular flame. It is called The Good Son and it is a strikingly theatrical stroke. Mellet's other exhibited work, all well made in a variety of media, mostly copper, is allegorical in approach. There are more allegories, and puns, in Mark Whelehan's small, agreeable, figurative bronzes.
Martin Kelly's wood carvings are always attentive to the natural form of the wood and at least one, Oak Flake, is outstanding (and exceptionally low in price).
