Visual Arts: Charles Tyrrell, paintings and drawings, Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare St Mon-Fri 10am-5.30pm, Sat 11am-3pm Ends Mar 3 (01-6766642); Substrata Sean Shanahan, John Noel Smith and Charles Tyrrell. Solstice Arts Centre, Navan Mon-Sat 10am-5pm Until Mar 16 (046-9092300); and It's not clear at this stage Draíocht, Blanchardstown Centre Mon-Sat 10am-6pm Ends Mar 3 (01-8852622)
The Taylor Gallery is quite a big place, just how big you realise if you visit Charles Tyrrell's solo exhibition there at the moment. It is on the scale of a small museum show, yet doesn't feel cramped. It also consists of several distinct bodies of work: larger paintings on canvas, a sequence of smaller paintings on aluminium plates, a series of drawings on paper and one site-specific wall drawing. A great deal of thought has gone into just about everything.
For example, Tyrrell was obviously not content to just recreate one of his existing drawings, writ larger, on the wall. Instead, he has made a highly distinctive piece that is substantially shaped by the architectural context.
In fact, the drawing somehow captures the spirit of the gallery itself, so that it reads almost as an affectionate acknowledgement of the artist's long association with the Taylor. One of the most rigorous and exacting of painters, Tyrrell never rests on his laurels. There is always the feeling that what remains, what we see, has come through wave after wave of intense scrutiny. He has used aluminium panels before and seems to like them, not least for the way the surface has a ruthlessness about it. Canvas is forgiving and cumulative as a support, accumulating a history of a painting's making in a layered, physical, almost geological way.
With aluminium, a certain precariousness creeps into the process. There's a jittery awareness that the slate might be wiped clean at any moment, and that the glassy surface will retain no cumulative record. Hence there's a more unstable, precarious quality to the aluminium panels. Remarkably, in every case you get the impression that Tyrrell is starting from scratch, taking nothing for granted, never settling for a solution he's found before.
The larger paintings in the show are also exceptionally good, but perhaps the most exciting development is what is effectively the drawing room, containing the small, intricately worked drawings made during residencies at the Ballinglen Foundation in North Mayo. The experience allowed Tyrrell to step back and reconsider fundamental approaches, and chances are that ideas introduced in these finely worked pieces will find their way into paintings in the future.
Tyrrell is one of three artists in Substrata at the Solstice Arts Centre in Navan. Although based in Allihies, he is from Trim, so Navan is close to home for him. Curated by Ciaran Bennett, Substrata marshals works by artists with different though complementary approaches. The others are John Noel Smith and Sean Shanahan. Bennett discerns links between them but doesn't push the idea of correspondence too far. He has in mind the layering of ocean currents, an image that suggests a level of separation, and he includes as part of the show an oceanic sound piece by Slavek Kwi, Musique pour poisson.
One always approaches galleries built as part of integrated artists' centres with trepidation. In the past, for "gallery" you could often read theatre lobby. This is not so much the case any more and it is not the case with the Solstice. It's a striking building, by Shelly McNamara and, while there is some exhibition space adjacent to the substantial theatre - quite a good wall actually - the gallery is self-contained on the top floor. It is a very particular space presenting certain curatorial challenges, but it has a lot going for it. Its three distinct rooms dictate the logic of Bennett's three-person show.
In a way there are three highlights, one by each artist.
Tyrrell's Angels II from 1999 is an extraordinarily good painting, and a relatively busy one for him. Yet it wears its many layers of activity lightly. Its heavily worked surface exudes a serenity yet engages the eye indefinitely. The "angels" are the four coloured sections that guard the corners. Quite how they are so well integrated with the overall grid pattern is something of a mystery, but they are.
Smith's Omphalos, a diptych, offers a more-or-less symmetrical reflection in which foreground and background colour are reversed, blue on green becoming green on blue. It, too, is a beautiful painting that achieves an equilibrium and has a touch of magic to it. Shanahan's work is monochromatic. Each painting is made with just one colour painted onto unprimed MDF. The smaller, untitled panel, a soft red, illustrates his knack for energising and completing an architectural setting. In all, it's a rich show that rewards patient attention.
Anna Boyle's It's not clear at this stage at Draíocht is an intriguing show. In a way it's all very upbeat. She uses bright colours and bold presentation so that there's a toy-like quality to her drawings and her sculptural piece. Her materials and formats recall art classes in school, but her text-based works drift into some dark areas of subject matter. One piece is a greatly enlarged drawing of a tabloid front page employing a number of stock phrases and headlines. The subject, here and elsewhere in her show, is violent, drug-related crime.
The implication of her work is that the day-to-day reality, within the communities, is translated into something else in media coverage. That the vernacular of crime reporting and the stark narratives that feed a public appetite for sensation - by no means a new development - are a travesty of reality, so that communities can, so to speak, become estranged from themselves, losing ownership and power to outside forces. There is an argument here for local empowerment, and for new strategies of representation.
In the upstairs space at Draíocht, Alan Daly's drawings are straightforward portraits in charcoal and coloured pastel. His work derives its sustenance from the direct encounter with the sitter. The individuals we see are "friends, family and fellow artists", and there is a sense of calmness and openness to the drawings. Rather than aim for technical virtuosity, that is to say, Daly prioritises the sitters, giving them some breathing space. The work is consistently good and engaging. If there is a weakness, oddly enough, it is not in terms of psychological empathy but physical presence: sometimes the sitter hardly registers as a material being.
