Gerard Byrne, in the strikingly titled Theatre-Bunker-Archives- Reception Area at Green on Red, makes photographs of anonymous, deserted urban interiors at night. Like Weegee in reverse, he prowls the city after dark looking for the places where nothing is going on. When he finds them, he sets up his camera outside the plate glass windows and records the spaces illuminated behind them like deserted stage sets. They are all the more like stage sets, in fact, because he often finds interiors that are being hastily remodelled to serve some unspecified bureaucratic function. Standard, generic items of office furniture are strewn about, wooden studs show through unfinished plasterboard walls, bundles of cable spill untidily out of conduit, cans of paint stand waiting.
Byrne doesn't try to disguise the fact that he never gets inside these spaces. On the contrary, in his photographs he leaves visible tell-tale reflections, in the window glass, of the street behind him. Paul Seawright's photographs of deserted urban spaces at the Kerlin Gallery are more pointedly laced with a sense of threat. Byrne's blank interiors don't suggest any undue menace, though you might reasonably regard them as creepy.
They do have an abandoned air about them, inviting questions about their function and their daytime inhabitants, and they are recognisable contemporary relations of Edward Hopper's paintings, which found unexpected poetry in mundane aspects of city life. It's striking that this kind of imagery, indicative of an exploration of hitherto neglected aspects of the urban environment, has become relatively widespread in photography, video and even painting - witness Leanne Keaney's eerily-lit photographs of warehouses and car parks in Bright Young Things at the Gallery of Photography recently.
Ronan McCrea's recent Project Off Site work view, was another interesting bid to bring a critical perception of urban spaces into the public arena. He distributed 100 posters of a single photograph around Dublin. It depicts a road curving sharply before a narrow prospect of suburban housing and some big low-lying, blank buildings - at least one of which looks like a prison. It is a prison, and that's not all. McCrea points out that there is also a halting site for travellers and a converted fever hospital that houses refugees, all contained within the same slice of landscape, which adds up to a crowded compendium of urban and social planning.
While he is venturing into interesting territory here, the problem is that not a lot of this is particularly evident in the space of his image, which is dominated by road and sky. Still, if the project didn't quite live up to its promise, it did touch on a potentially vast subject. Dublin, and that includes everywhere within commutable distance of the city, is undergoing radical changes on several levels. It's not only an interesting subject matter, particularly amenable to photography and promising a wealth of material, but one that really should be taken on.
One aspect of Dublin is its extraordinary proximity to the heather desert of the Wicklow Mountains. They are the favoured stamping ground of painter Niall Wright, whose recent work is showing at the Hallward Gallery. He makes rather sombre, unvarying landscape studies of mountain bogland. A series of portrait-shaped compositions hinge on a single division: sky above, heavily textured ground below. Apart from a handful of horizontal compositions, some very good, this really is pretty unvarying, but it has to be said that he works hard at conveying the subtle variations of tone, colour and texture of a beautiful, if austere, environment.
While his paintwork can have a slightly tortured look, on the whole he's reasonably successful. Above the horizon line he is less so, and still experiences some problems with getting the skies right, particularly when it comes to grey - which is most of the time. There is a dispiriting deadness about some of his skies that isn't so much atmospherically accurate - which he might reasonably argue - as lacking in touch. Just look at Constable.
Adrienne Dooling, at the Paul Kane Gallery, makes very robust studies of female nudes. Her continual emphasis on the fleshy, corporeal materiality of her figures is reminiscent of Jenny Saville's ambivalently fleshy paintings of an obese model and her photographs of parts of her own deliberately compressed and distorted body.
Dooling allows herself more expressive elbow room, using paint fluidly and loosely, letting it smear, run and drip liberally. There is tremendous energy in her work, and though her figures could certainly be said to delight in their own physicality, they also strain restlessly against real or imagined confinements, crouching, contorted, blurred in movement. They are exposed but never remotely passive or coy. Source, with its ruddy genitalia, seems like a direct riposte to Courbet's notorious painting Origin of the World.
There's a complete change of mood in the second room of the Paul Kane Gallery, where the appropriately named Maura Austen shows a series of restrained, drawing-room portrait studies. Modest in scale, understated in substance, they are calm, though quirky little character sketches which employ a variety of motifs to suggest the nature of each subject. Hence Boy River, or Woman Bird. Austen's pared-down style flirts with the naive, but there is something genuinely engaging about her work, not least her empathic openness to her subjects.
Gerard Byrne's Theatre-Bunker-Archives-Reception Area are at the Green on Red Gallery until October 9th; Niall Wright's paintings are at the Hallward Gallery until October 7th; Adrienne Dooling and Maura Austen are at the Paul Kane Gallery until October 2nd
