Aidan Dunne reviews Mark Joyce: Lissadell Birdsong, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, until December 22nd (01-6713414); Michael Canning: Everything And Almost Nothing, Hallward Gallery, Dublin, until December 2nd (01-6621482) Amy O'Riordan: Seeing Ourselves, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until November 29th (01-8740064).
The title of Mark Joyce's current exhibition at Green on Red, Lissadell Birdsong, succinctly indicates his area of interest and his approach. Lissadell, in Co Sligo, is a well-known place with a distinctive history, atmosphere and associations. Working there on field trips with students, Joyce thought about the question of painting a place. Painters often identify strongly with particular places, just as places often come to be identified with particular painters. But it is as if as soon as he focused on the notion of painting a place, Joyce was struck by the difficulty of doing so. In a note to himself he listed a cross section of features about Lissadell that struck him. "What do you include?" he asks himself at the end.
Which is where the birdsong comes in, presumably. How do you paint birdsong? Should you try? To judge by what we see in the gallery, without being dogmatic about it, he set out to make work employing some of the language and ideas of early modernist abstraction. Rather than making conventional representations, he looks to a simplified, abstracted language of shapes and patterns, stripes, waves, discs. Colour becomes crucial, and he tries to devise a very specific palette, rather in the manner of Bridget Riley's Egyptian palette.
A vitrine in the middle of the gallery contains a number of studies on paper, notebooks and other material, much of it presumably made on the spot in Lissadell. A great deal of it looks fascinating and complete in itself.
On the walls are 16 paintings, made in acrylic on gessoed panel. They are very sparing in form and substance. Here Comes The Rain is a constellation of teardrop shapes in blue and green. Summer Berries is, unusually, an explosive cacophony of extremely intense reds. Lissadell Birdsong itself turns up twice, once as horizontal bands of delicate colour, recalling a musical stave, and once as coloured discs, suggesting sounds in the air.
Music and sound come to mind again and again in relation to the paintings. This may have to do with an attempt to instinctively match colour to sound, but there is also a wider investigation into matching form and colour to the momentary experience of place and all that might entail. Joyce is an exceptionally resourceful artist, and the work is bracingly open-minded and adventurous - but also informed and judicious.
Most of the paintings in Michael Canning's exhibition at the Hallward Gallery are called simply Field Study. There is an element of humour in his use of the term, despite the show's portentous title, Everything And Almost Nothing, and the air of damp, brooding melancholy that dominates. The paintings are landscapes, literally studies of the fields around the artist's home in Co Limerick, but they are also about the notion of field study, about structured ways of looking at landscape and at nature.
They evoke the perspectives of botanist, naturalist, anthropologist and romantic artist - romantic in the sense of the northern European romantic tradition, characterised by a chill precision of observation. Formalised, beautifully rendered depictions of wild flowers stand against moody sweeps of agricultural terrain. Dark land recedes to a misty blur.
Huge skies are filled with improbably vast and elaborate formations of migrating birds, sometimes recognisably swallows. We can discern the random pattern of stand-alone housing working its way across the countryside in Ribbon Development, counterpointing the ribbon development of countless birds strung out in arcs across the sky.
Canning inherits ways of looking and tries them out. The appearance of his paintings mimics age: they look as if they have been around for a century or more. Yet the object of the exercise is anything but pastiche. He is applying accumulated ways of looking to the world around him in an exploratory, investigative spirit, and there is real emotional engagement in his work. He is a northern romantic, not just a man out to impersonate one.
Amy O'Riordan's Seeing Ourselves, at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, marshals a group of photographs of young women, including two self-portraits, both of them among the best things in the show. These, and all of her work, are meticulously styled and arranged.
The film director John Boorman once remarked that when you see a film, every single detail of every frame on the screen should be intended on the part of the film-maker. An obvious point, perhaps, but one often disregarded by film-makers and photographic artists alike.
Not by O'Riordan. Her brilliantly composed and detailed images have a poised inevitability that is in many respects painterly - but, lest this makes them sound like museum pieces, they are also edgily, tremendously alive. Her Trudy's House is a version of the Three Graces in which, typically, the three ostensible objects of contemplation cooly reflect the gaze of the spectator.
Her subjects, often young women preparing to present themselves to the world, in private spaces, living rooms and bedrooms, are invariably self-assured, self-contained presences. This is so even when O'Riordan creates a tableaux that mischievously alludes to voyeuristic sexual fantasy in Girls' Night In. It has to do partly with the way they embody and inhabit style, with the fact that they can carry it off. This applies as much to the artist herself astride a carousel horse, bejewelled and aloof, in a resonant image that perfectly marries classical poise and popular culture. O'Riordan is an extremely capable and gifted artist.
