MARK Joyce's early pictures were small, highly individual and rather quirky, with a nice turn of visual humour and a sense of imagery all his own, though occasionally we wondered just how far and deep he could work that particular vein.
A few years ago, he switched styles and began painting rather cloudy, though interesting, little abstract pictures, generally muted or greyish in tone. The canvases on view in the Green on Red Gallery might be described as a reconciliation of the two trends, although this description will not take us very far. In spite of such motifs as miniature trees standing in rows in a park, or a toy church, these pictures are mainly about themselves, hermetic and self contained.
Titles are as likely to be quasi humorous and riddling (Incident in the Afternoon, etc) as explanatory, and often the style has a deliberate, graffito like casualness. This is roughly the equivalent of the laid back school of contemporary writing, deadpan and not giving much away.
The best of the small pictures, I thought, was Skyline, which is mainly a composition in irregular rows of dots and spots. Antarctica, an unexpectedly large canvas in two parts like a diptych, rather resembles a stencilled design, in this case a cityscape viewed from the air but blurred into a kind of textile design pattern. This is not really Joyce's world, and certainly it is not his scale, since the whole thing is discouragingly blank.
Whatever about shifts of style, this young painter still has style. Yet there is something tantalisingly understated, tentative or transitional about this exhibition as a unit, and it would be a relief if, in the near future, he showed his hand fully. After all, he holds some good cards.
