In the current IMMA exhibition of works selected from the museum's permanent collection, one room features a Sean Scully stripe painting juxtaposed with a landscape by Mary Lohan. It is, on the face of it, an incongruous combination: Scully's flat, austere, pared-down abstraction set against a lush, thickly painted evocation of the western coastline. Classical and romantic. Yet it's actually a perceptive pairing, one that is elucidated by Lohan's new exhibition at the Taylor Gallery, Sea Met Sky.
Most of the paintings in the show are diptychs or triptychs, the better to encompass the span of the northwestern landscape. Time and again, thick, buttery masses of pigment are heaped, dragged, hollowed and blended to create spare representations of the same elemental trinity: land, sea, sky. The paintings are atmospherically accurate, often to an uncanny extent, but not in a conventional way. As if by a kind of painterly uncertainty principle, the closer we look for naturalistic detail, the more what we look at dissolves into pure, anonymous paint.
This is emphasised by the way irregular lumps of pigment accumulate at the edges of the boards on which the paintings are made. For Lohan, the trick is to maintain a fruitful, unresolved tension between two divergent readings of the work: the romantic evocation of a sublime landscape and the concrete reality of the painting as object.
Perhaps she eschews the depiction of such local detail as habitation not, as you might suspect, to preserve the notion of the unbounded Western landscape, but rather to allow the play of paint qua paint, without the distraction of being tied to imagery dependent on any kind of unambiguous detail. As it is, detail in her work is simply paint. She balances the competing demands of image and object with aplomb, and has produced an outstanding show.
In Hiroshi Sugimoto's celebrated photographs of cinema screens, the accumulated light of projected films produces glowing white rectangles. Wille McKeown's apparently flat, monochrome paintings at the Kerlin Gallery have a comparable structure: a calm, even serene surface underwritten by invisible layers of preparatory activity. As with his last show, this one makes a beautiful installation and demands sustained attention, perhaps even patience, of viewers.
The scheme in the main gallery space is extraordinarily spare: three off-white canvases, three grey and one bright yellow. It looks as if no two pieces are identical. The one that really stands out, though, is the yellow, a vibrant affair that really bounces off the wall. It's surprising that the yellow painting sits so comfortably with its quieter neighbours, and that the minimal differences evident elsewhere produce such a strong sense of variety. Take the time to see this work as a unit.
By contrast, Brian Ballard, at the Solomon Gallery, paints like a man in a hurry. Each piece is a brisk flurry of brush strokes, a painterly shorthand, and each depends to some extent on our knowledge of its particular genre: landscape, still life or nude. Once we know, everything falls into place.
He's good at reducing things to a formal scaffolding, he has a sense of colour that is convincing without being naturalistic and tonally he's quite adventurous, but his work is uneven and sometimes formulaic. Model Against Green, the nicely dark River at Lambeg, Co Antrim, and Blue Jug, Inisfree are strong examples from each genre, but when he ups the scale in Objects and Sea, Inisfree, he's in trouble.
Four artists share the two floors of The Bridge Gallery. Upstairs, Stephen Vaughan's prints are big, schematic composites, built up from several plates and different techniques, in which dark burnished tones are set against exceptionally bright colours. The images suggest blocks and enclosures, hard, industrial forms and they have a sombre, brooding presence. Julie Shiels, showing ceramics, says her work is associated with the sea. Her Seeded Sea Pods are pod-like vessels of varying sizes. They are graceful, natural forms with good surfaces, though a little repetitious.
Downstairs, two textile artists acquit themselves very well. Jennifer Wilson's narrative images in felt are beautifully made, with a fine colour sense. The mere mention of embroidery may make you yawn, but Aileen Johnston's machine embroidered images are remarkable. She has done a fair amount of illustration work, and these piece are certainly illustrative, but not in any pejorative sense. Technically brilliant, she also has her own distinctive, offbeat visual style and her work is singular and engaging.
In Studio 8 at Temple Bar, you can see and hear Ian Breakwell's installation The Rose, made in co-operation with composer Ron Geesin. You enter the darkened room alone, don a pair of headphones, press a button and a light box flares into life in front of you. The tolling of a bell and the rose pattern of the box immediately suggest the stained glass in a cathedral, but in place of conventional religious imagery the circle is filled with a mass of skeletons contorted in a dance of death.
To describe the piece even thus far is to dilute its effect, but it's giving nothing away to say that the image is accompanied by a chillingly effective, very clever soundtrack that will have you glancing nervously over your shoulder. It's a conceptually fine piece of work and crisply expressed.
Martine Franck's Tory Island images, at the Gallery of Photography, and John Byrne and Sean Hillen's collaborative exhibition Among Your Own, at Arthouse, make a striking contrast in their respective uses of photography. Franck's handsome show looks almost quaintly oldfashioned. She is a Magnum photographer, and she first visited Tory in 1993 with the painter Derek Hill and has returned several times since.
Her work is in the style of classical reportage: well composed documentary images of the island and its people with informative captions. It is all in black-and-white. If it were in colour it could be a National Geographic picture essay, with pretty much all the limitations that implies.
Among Your Own entails an altogether less respectful attitude to the medium. Photographs are shamelessly distorted through digital manipulation and overlaid with chunks of text that read like excerpts from an acerbic comic monologue by John Byrne.
The images may be sloppy, throw-away and largely bogus, but they use artifice to get beneath the skin, and after reading through Byrne's bitingly sarcastic commentary on the general subject of growing up in Northern Ireland and learning about how things work there, in terms of such realities as religious bigotry and the border, you do feel you've had a glimpse of what it is - or was - really like. As opposed to what it looks like, which is what, in the case of Tory Island, you take away from Franck's show.
Sea Met Sky, Taylor Galleries, until September 26th. Willie McKeown, Kerlin Gallery, until October 5th. Brian Ballard, Solomon Gallery, until September 30th. Autumn exhibition, Bridge Gallery, until October 3rd. The Rose, Studio 8, Temple Bar Studios, until September 30th. The Spinning Room, Jo Rain, until September 20th. Tory Island, Gallery of Photography, until September 30th. Among Your Own, Arthouse, until September 30th.
