Visual Arts Aidan DunneColour Chart, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, until December 20th (048-90321402)Philip Moss and Madeleine Moore, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast, until December 5th (048-90235245)Veneer/Folheado, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, until November 22nd (048-90313303)Nick Danziger: A British Journey, Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast, until November 22nd (048-90233332)David Mach, Belfast Print Workshop until November 22nd (028-90231323)
The Ormeau Baths' Colour Chart exhibition attempts, ambitiously, to survey contemporary Irish painting, within a particular sense of the term. That sense is difficult to articulate precisely, but it has to do with a contemporary wariness about the question of formalism and an acknowledgement that painters tend to work within structured formal languages. The bulk of the work could be described as inclining towards abstraction, though without the baggage of formalist autonomy that came with prescriptive, high-modernist descriptions of painting.
Pretty much all of it, in other words, is open to worldly contamination, ready to admit its inevitable involvement in the world beyond the confines of the canvas. Although the exhibition is a survey of sorts, it is by no means a roll-call of Irish painters working in the general area: there are too many absences for that. Absences are inevitable, but some of them - including, say, Charles Tyrrell or Paul Nugent - seem glaring in the context.
Back to what we do have, which is a reasonably, agreeably coherent show. The Venice Biennale featured an exhibition of painting this year that was positively incoherent. Here the shared notion of formal rigour holds things together. The restrained though luxuriant chromatic expanses of Marie Hanlon's spare compositions, the first pieces you encounter, set the tone. Disciplined and conjectural, they propose that we look at them and think about looking, and once we've gotten over that hurdle we're into the world of the painter.
There is resistance to making that mental leap. Some people just won't, and they certainly won't be able to in every case. From Sean Shanahan's austerely monochromatic paintings to Mark McGreevy's messily promiscuous, doodleish evocations of real and abstract spaces, there is a range of possibilities on view. And some outstanding work. Apart from the foregoing, Fergus Feehily's subtle grid-based compositions are quietly convincing. Rather more conspicuously, Paul Doran's impossibly thick impasto is likely to stop you in your tracks. His Surgery, with its torn skin and sagging masses of pigment, suggest new areas of reference for him.
There is some correspondence with Alexis Harding's melted, acidic grids and Cian Donnell's extraordinary objectification of paint in his bright, toylike pieces. Willie McKeown poses us a puzzle about time in his Forever Paintings about transient moments. There is a great deal to enjoy.
The kind of work featured in Colour Chart would as a rule be quite at home at the Fenderesky Gallery, which, untypically, currently features two representational painters, Madeleine Moore and Philip Moss. There is a strange, dreamy quality to Moore's images. She works in a vein of muted, pared-down realism in some ways not unakin to the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans. Although several of her pictures turn out, though usually only after close inspection, to be oblique views of conventional landscape, they maintain a residual sense of the uncanny. Other pieces, such as the eerie constellation of sunflowers at night, are uncanny through and through. All are richly atmospheric. She is a good, intuitive painter with a nice touch and a sound, unshowy sense of colour.
Most of Moss's paintings are of piles of things. That is to say, each features a pile of one kind of thing: shoes, drainpipes, cardboard boxes, turf. They are depicted against a plain background under a hard light in a meticulous, toughly realist style. There is a sense of telling it like it is. But what are they telling? A rose is a rose. Moss seems to be out to emphasise the thingness of each object through force of repetition, although the process becomes a cumulative reminder, à la Magritte, that the thing is in this case a skin of paint and not a thing at all. Yet there is a fascination in the versatility of the representation. Given the requisite skill in the painter, the mimetic potential of oil paint as a medium is unfailingly seductive. Our eyes become engaged, which is perhaps why, here, in one case, we find the baleful eye of the artist looking back at us, reflected in the centre of one of the stacks.
The boxes, all surfaces, all apparently opened and empty, hint at the promise and trickery of painting. There is a recurrent play on what might be behind the stacks, with the hint that what might be there is, of course, nothing, not the continuation of a surrounding wall. So these are paintings about painting, about what might be behind painting and about perception. They are thoughtful, open to many levels of interpretation and visually intriguing.
In an ongoing game of musical chairs, Catalyst Arts and Belfast Exposed have swapped locations. The latter has relocated to a bigger space on Donegall Street, once Catalyst's territory, and Catalyst is down an alleyway to the rear of Queen Street, close to Belfast Exposed's erstwhile home. A photocopy stuck to the door marks the spot, just about. Ascend several flights of narrow stairs and you find yourself in a dark, cavernous space with several smaller adjuncts. It accommodates a substantial exhibition of contemporary Portuguese art, Veneer/ Folheado, with no problem.
The show, the second part of an exchange, is a good idea. The darkness is necessary, because it involves a lot of projection and video. Nuno da Silva's two-sided projection Divided Land gives us opposing views of a vast wall, a work with obvious local and international relevance. João Maria Gusmano and Pedro Paiva show two pieces, contrasted in mood, a theatrically effective installation featuring a disappearing boulder and a humorous video, Landslide Victim.
Roy Otero has a monitor showing episodes from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining with an added laughter track. Ivo's big, visionary, picaresque paintings draw inventively on the exuberant fantasy of Brazilian baroque.
Paulo Mendes's photo-text Perhaps In Northern Ireland, with half-demolished buildings and burnt-out cars is predictable. One of the best pieces is Ines Botelhi's installation, a pristine white room in which a skewed moulding generates a subtle but unmistakable air of unease. But if Catalyst wants people to go to its shows, it should do something about the visibility of the venue.
Photographs from Nick Danziger's A British Journey, black and white and printed on a large scale, feature at the Old Museum Arts Centre. His gritty photojournalism details a winter journey across a bleak postindustrial landscape of social housing and neglect. The resilience of individuals, manifested in outbursts of energy and displays of grace under pressure, provides a quasi positive note, but generally a grim picture of alienation and frustration emerges. He could be criticised for accentuating the negative, but even if we don't get the whole story from his account, it's still highly disturbing, with ominous implications.
The remarkable Scottish artist David Mach was artist-in-residence at Belfast Print Workshop during Belfast Festival at Queen's, and a show of his screen prints continues there. They are samples and remixes of imagery and motifs from comics, mostly of the violent, second World War variety.
He has picked up on the considerable skill of the graphic artists in several compositions dominated by moodily atmospheric treatments of landscape. But he has also lighted on some quirky conventions of the genre, particularly the visualisation of sound effects. Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang features a pattern of four explosions abstracted from their source narrative and floating incongruously on the paper. Like more or less all of his work,it's witty, but after the 10th or so time you begin to feel he needs another joke.
