Academy Without Walls at the RHA Gallagher Gallery counterpoints work by academicians with that of "ideal" academies chosen by five invited artists. It makes for an exceptionally good show, not least because the academicians have resisted the temptation to swamp the gallery with their own work and restricted themselves to single pieces - some of them very good, including Basil Blackshaw's informal portrait, Richard Kingston's gutsy evocation of a rhododendron forest, Veronica Bolay's richly atmospheric Mayo study and Martin Gale's slice-of-life scene which nods to the big figure compositions of an earlier era.
However, the point of the show is presumably to allow some fresh air into the stuffy confines of the academy, and all five artist-selectors do that very effectively. Their choices are not merely interesting, they are generally astute as well. These artists know how to look. There are, for example, enterprising selections of painting by Diarmuid Delargy and Joan O'Connor.
Delargy lists "alive, bold, humorous, no-nonsense, tough, well-made and resonant" as the qualities he looked for, and his choice of work delivers. Whether you like their work or not, all of his 19 artists are completely engaged with what they're doing. Pictures by Martin Wedge and Colin McGookin are two pleasant surprises in his selection. O'Connor's choice is characterised by a lighter touch, perhaps, with artists like Jackie Cooney, John Doherty and Hector McDonnell, but the work is invariably engaging.
Sculptor Cathy Carman's academy is predictably biased towards sculpture, which is good for the overall balance of the show. Joe Butler, Gabby Dowling, Elizabeth Caffrey, James McKenna, Marie Foley, Janet Mullarney and Maurice O'Connell all show estimable pieces. William Crozier runs a tight ship with a choice of, he says, just a dozen artists though, puzzlingly, only10 are listed in the catalogue. Felim Egan has a baker's dozen, branching into musical composition with three pages of handwritten musical score by John Buckley.
Another composer, Gerald Barry, crosses the line and makes a drawing. And, as with Joan O'Connor, who included Kevin Roche in her academy, there is architecture, with plans and a model of the striking new primary school in Ranelagh by Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey. It is, in all, a rewarding, provocative exercise.
`What the hell are you doing here looking at another man's trees, in another man's field, when you have your own patch?" That's the question Sean McSweeney recalls asking himself while painting in Spain some years ago. His own patch is, famously, the shoreline bog that lies outside his front door in County Sligo. This "wild garden" is the seemingly inexhaustible source and stimulus for most of his work as a painter.
His current Taylor Gallery show, Bogland Shoreline Sligo, is a case in point. In some 55 paintings he explores this landscape of pools and plants, beaches and headlands with unfailing urgency and palpable excitement. The picture titles refer to several seasons but, perhaps because of the year that's in it, a wintry mood predominates. This might have been a risky thing to do, but McSweeney, painting with mature authority, unerringly captures the desolate, soulful beauty of his home ground. A Dubliner who has been based in Co Kerry for several years, Helen Richmond is best known for spirited paintings of her adoptive environment. Her current exhibition, at the Hallward Gallery, encompasses rather different terrain. The paintings and pastels there are the fruit of six months spent in Australia last year, and the show is appropriately titled Through Layers of Heat. Channel, a big, vigorously painted view of a jumbled cliff face, is typical of her direct, even confrontational style. The painting gives off a palpable sense of heat, from the dry baked shades of ochre stone to the silvery green foliage and the murky strip of water along the bottom of the composition. She can be overly emphatic in her pictorial descriptions, but when she gets the balance right the effect is terrific. The oils are augmented by a fine series of small pastels.
Alexis Harding's paintings at the Rubicon are subversions of the inflexible grid. They begin life as grids, laid wet on wet, a web of commercial gloss paint on a monochromatic oil ground. Then, as he puts it, he lives with each work through the months of its maturation, as the paint dries, tilting it and so allowing gravity to play its crucial role. The resultant images are sagging, distorted grids frozen in bunched and wrinkled skins of paint.
They are surely concerned with the notion of duration that many artists and commentators identify as a key element of painting, but also with the inevitability of decay and disintegration. Harding displays a liking for colours and combinations with a slightly astringent edge - sometimes with a very astringent edge. His work is rigorous, not at all ingratiating, and occasionally beautiful.
Mary Rose Binchy's show of paintings and prints at Green on Red, Cadence, bravely aims for subtle effects. Obliquely allusive titles - Vespers, Silences, Beyond the Veil - complement spare, quietly atmospheric compositions. Together they suggest fleeting impressions, blurred glimpses, intangibles that are nevertheless invested with considerable significance. The works themselves don't quite have the substance to embody this level of profundity, but they are getting there.
As a postscript to the retrospective at IMMA, the Kerlin is showing a range of work by William Scott. There are some fine pieces, including an early figure study, and what might be described as some routine Scotts: spare, linear still lifes, not especially compelling. The best of the still lifes on view are older and more heavily worked.
Academy Without Walls, runs at the RHA Gallagher Gallery until October 31st. Sean McSweeney, Bogland Shoreline Sligo, runs at the Taylor Galleries until October 31st. Helen Richmond, Through Layers of Heat, runs at the Hallward Gallery until October 23rd. Alexis Harding, New paintings, runs at the Rubicon Gallery until November 7th. Cadence, Mary Rose Binchy, runs at the Green on Red Gallery until October 31st. William Scott runs at the Kerlin Gallery until November 2nd.
