VISUAL ARTS/Aidan Dunne. Reviewed: Neal Tait, paintings, Douglas Hyde Gallery (01-6081116), Dublin, until September 18th, Makiko Nakamura, Fenderesky Gallery(048-90235245), Belfast, until September 20th and Fionnuala Ní Chiosain, Kerlin Gallery (01-6709093), Dublin, until September 7th.
There is a hesitant, almost self-effacing quality about Neal Tait's work at the Douglas Hyde Gallery. It is one among several aspects of his paintings that suggest a comparison with those of the Belgian Luc Tuymans. Also relevant to such a comparison are his practice of working from indirect sources and a liking for subdued, washed-out palette. At first glance you would be inclined to think that both artists evidence the same nostalgia for the real.
Despite some common ground, however, there are significant differences, not least the fact that Tait is more varied - not to mention quirky - in his lines of approach. He paints portraits, studies of objects, interiors and other, cryptic subjects.
Sometimes the faces of the people he depicts are rendered as masks. Sometimes he will provide only a sketchy, fragmentary indication of a subject. Often it is as if he loses heart somewhere along the way and finds he cannot follow through on a painting. But the resultant inconclusiveness says what he wants to say or, rather, doesn't quite say what he doesn't quite want to say.
The subjects of his portraits, never more than partially evoked in his studies, remain remote from us, estranged, in their own worlds. Just as, apparently, they are remote from and unknown to Tait, who acquires their images from car boot sales, newspapers and junk shops. There is a suggestion of reconstruction, of an attempt to recover something lost or missing, in his cautious investigation of these images and individuals through painting. But as he moves towards establishing frameworks of meaning or significance within each work, he seems to falter and question the basis of what he is doing. This uncertainty then feeds back into the sources of his material.
The implication is that the possibilities of meaning are limited and shot through with doubt. Surprisingly, a couple of years ago Tait (who is from Edinburgh and was a guitarist with a punk rock group before he began painting), was taken on by Jay Jopling of the White Cube Gallery in London, the dealer known for his work with a rather brasher kind of Brit art.
Perhaps Jopling was looking around for a new mood for the new century. Certainly in Tait's images of frayed nerves and fragile identities, there is a strong feeling that the party's over.
The most striking thing about Makiko Nakamura's paintings, at the Fenderesky Gallery in Belfast, is a spare grouping of a number of large, impassive paintings, mostly dark to black, although there is one large silver composition as well, in the ground floor gallery. Individually very strong, these have a grave, stately presence and make up a remarkably effective piece of installation. Nakamura makes grid based abstracts. The surfaces of her paintings are worked to a glassy sheen. So far, you might think, so formal and minimal. But in fact there is something different going on here.
It is clear that the paintings are built up in layers, or rather built up in long, repetitive cycles of application and erasure. The eventual image, with its mirror surface, seems both entirely there on the surface and endlessly recessive as the foliated patterns of erased layers are faintly legible in the skin of the painting. Each work is based on a grid framework, but apart from the geometric regularity of the grid, there is another kind of mark, gestural and free, that is incised into every bit of the process. The result is of tempestuousness distilled into the apparent calm of the surface, in the way that the polished stone-like face is underwritten by intense, sometimes seething activity.
The paintings are dense with time and history, but balance on the knife edge of "now", a now that is not only elusive, but is always, already gone by the time we realise it. Aesthetically, Nakamura's work is very fine, but it is also marked by a spirit of austerity, so that it never becomes self-consciously beautiful. There is always an underlying toughness.
In Fionnuala Ní Chiosain's previous work, there was usually a sense of something close to a controlled accident.
The artist set things up, then stood back to see how it turned out. Each piece was the culmination of a sequence of all-or- nothing actions. The use of line and divisions was rhythmic and repetitive. The palette was distinctly chilly, and the surfaces looked - intentionally - vulnerable and unprotected.
All of which is true of her new paintings at the Kerlin. The dispassionate, probing quality, the repetitive elements and the rest are all there.
What is new is the consistent link to representational references, to motifs in landscape and, at least once, to figures. All of this takes the work into new emotional areas.
The chilly feeling is linked to winter. While her work was always watery in the sense of its fluid processes, now bodies of water play a prominent role. Yet there is still an offhand air to it in that Ní Chiosain never labours at representation, preferring the effect of casual-seeming links. Rorschach-like blots nudge us towards specific representational readings without forcing the issue. One development is that the air of detachment tends to locate the imagery in memory rather than here and now, lending it a remote, recollected air. This show is a significant transitional moment for her.
