VISUAL ART:MARY LOHAN'S Ballyconnigarat the Taylor Galleries features paintings based on the Wexford coastline. It is a big exhibition, extending through four rooms and over two storeys, and incorporating several distinct sets of work, including oil paintings built up with areas of incredibly thick impasto, a series of tiny oil panels, and a group of framed and glazed oils on paper.
There is an obsessive, hypnotic quality to Lohan's reiteration of a compositional format made up of horizontal or skewed swathes of colour, each band corresponding to sky, sea or shoreline.
While the format recurs, what seems to fascinate the artist within that format is the infinite variation of atmospheric effects, visualised in areas of layered colour, tone and texture. Everything stays the same, but everything changes all the time. This mindset, and this way of working, recall abstract painters including Seán Scully and Charles Tyrrell, artists who work in terms of certain self-imposed formal rules, rather than landscape painters per se. Just as Scully is stimulated by and responsive to environmental conditions such as the character of winter light near water or the fall of evening sunlight on stone facades, so Lohan draws on the fabric of the endlessly responsive shoreline landscape, its expanses of sky, water, sand and grass reflecting every shift in time and weather.
Her work is popular with a wide public, and one can see why. It has the potential to position the viewer in what could be described as an idyllic space, an elemental setting remote from the crowds and bustle of everyday life, in which there is an opportunity to consider oneself in a much broader context. This is not to say, though, that it is escapist or anachronistic. In fact, you could say that this quality relates to the nature of painting and art in general, in that it affords a hypothetical space that allows us imaginative room for manoeuvre.
Besides, Lohan's paintings are pursued with a toughness and a rigour that comes across very clearly. Through a long, arduous process of working and reworking, their surfaces are scored and heaped and churned up, with colours mixed into dense, layered masses (pink has a notable prominence in this exhibition). Given which, it is surprising to enter a room lined with works on paper, in which thin glazes are used to achieve rich but subtle effects of light and depth.
Previously, Lohan has spread the considerable energies of her paintings across diptychs and triptychs, and perhaps it is because this exhibition features works on individual panels that each comes across as being exceptionally intense and concentrated.
SIX ARTISTS, all of whom are women, feature in So What Are You Looking At?,curated by Philip Boxberger at the Mermaid Gallery. It's not a thematic show, and there's no unanimity of style. What's offered is, Boxberger says, six different slants on the world. There are also different ideas of what pictures should be and how they might be presented. The show's title is taken from one of Denise Hussey's stylised depictions of cattle - bold, vivid paintings that come across as variations on an original theme by John Shinnors.
Kate Murphy makes dark, densely-worked, heavily-varnished paintings that combine images of dwellings seen from afar with close-up details of wallpaper patterns, emblematic of domesticity. There's a deliberately over-cooked Gothicism to it all. Her best piece is Pedestal II, which has a great sense of scale and space. In quite a different vein, Finola Cooney is a textural painter with a light touch, good colour sense and a tactful feeling for form.
Jenny Richardson's still lifes are thoughtfully, patiently observed. She is attentive to the substance of each thing, and not just its appearance, which gives her painting real presence. Alwyn Gillespie's small, panoramic views of the shoreline around Dublin city are busy and engaging, though framed in a way that is just wrong for them. Leda Scully's small paintings are unframed and all of them are considered, understated and quietly compelling. It's almost as if each one is a fragment of a whole that gradually becomes apparent as we piece them together. Her use of a bleached-out, simplified realism is a variation on what amounts to a prevalent contemporary style exemplified in the work of Luc Tuymans, but Scully certainly brings something valuable of her own to the process. Her works linger in the mind and Lonely Gull (After CDF)is a real gem.
MIRIAM McCONNON'S paintings at the Lemonstreet Gallery centre on a single motif, a communion dress. A note tells us that the dress is one of the few possessions that McConnon brought with her when she left Ireland to live in Cyprus. "The communion dress represents to her a time of innocence, when religious faith was not questioned; it is a link to her homeland and to her childhood."
The dress hangs, a bit incongruously, on the wall of her studio, and McConnon draws and paints it "obsessively", though one feels that the obsessiveness is more contrived than actual. Certainly by the time you get through the exhibition, you might feel it's time she puts the dress into storage and gets out more. This is not to say that she hasn't made some good work based on it. She has, but doesn't seem to differentiate between good and indifferent, and what is an overcrowded show would have been much better in every respect with some judicious pruning.
She has evident feeling for nuances of tone and texture, and achieves some beautiful, delicate effects in extending the fabric pattern so that it shimmers against the background, a ghostly reminder of what she once was, an earlier stage of herself. But a couple of additional props - a noose and a stool - seem disproportionately melodramatic under the circumstances.
As an artist of real potential, she needs to be much more self-critical, to pay more attention to the pieces where she seems to be getting somewhere ( The Hanging of the Communion Dress IIIor Turned Palefor example), and much less to symbolic meanings for their own sake.
• Ballyconnigar Mary Lohan, Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare St, Dublin 2, until June 13;So What Are You Looking At? Work by six artists in a show curated by Philip Boxberger: Jenny Richardson, Denise Hussey, Alwyn Gillespie, Kate Murphy, Leda Scully and Finola Cooney, Mermaid Arts Centre, Main St, Bray, until June 14; Miriam McConnon Paintings, Lemonstreet Gallery, 24-26 City Quay, Dublin 2, until June 5.
