Irish Times Art Critic Aidan Dunne casts his eye over the latest exhibitions

Reviewed:
Midnight, Diana Copperwhite, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until Feb 19 (01-8740064)
Uncertain Sins, Charlie Whisker, Solomon Gallery until Feb 9 (01-6794237)
Walter Verling, paintings, Belltable Arts Centre until Feb 4

Diana Copperwhite's earliest exhibited paintings were architectonic compositions. This is not to say that they were pictures of buildings, though buildings did serve as points of reference. Rather she used the idea of architectural spaces almost as a metaphor for the kinds of space opened up by applying and moving paint around on canvas. There was tremendous drive and verve to the work, and a sheer painterliness that was unusual at a time when painterly qualities were generally kept at one remove or eschewed altogether.

In a way the work in her new show, Midnight at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, marks a return to that starting point. But this time around, the spaces that she evokes are not straightforwardly architectural, and she tries to deal with something trickier still: the figure.

Figures are trickier because of the way she constitutes her images. They emerge from the hectic give-and-take of paint-work, enjoying only a precarious, contingent presence. Sometimes figurative detail can be very definite, as in Retro Girl, sometimes pushed to the point of abstraction, always it resembles just a momentary configuration of larger currents that might sweep it away at any moment.

Copperwhite draws her imagery from a variety of sources. As with the architectural sources in her earlier work, the motif of a figure in a space is a point of reference, a given around which a picture forms, or perhaps emerges. The initial motif makes the painting possible in that the painting could be described as an extended meditation on the imaginative, depicted space of the source. What seems to interest her is the pure potential of this versatile fictional space, with its possibilities of multiple interpretation - something that hinges on maintaining an openness in the paintings, on not pinning things down too much.

Midnight balances between p.m. and a.m. and is remarkably bright - the midnight sun? Here and elsewhere there is something ghostly about the way we can glimpse traces and vestiges of representational detail, like something half-remembered, some past event clouded over by distorting layers of memory but still oddly, vaguely recognisable. The female figure eating an apple in Trance looks as if she is lost in a daydream, and it is as if the picture aims to convey the inner, extended, mental space of dreaming, perhaps visualised in the vessel that occupies the centre of the composition.

But in the end the dreaminess has to be embodied in the paint itself, and that is Copperwhite's strong point: her distinctive palette, her exceptional feeling for the texture and consistency of paint. She uses a great deal of colour, but usually knocked down several tones from anything like its full intensity, and usually without strident tonal contrast. Her pinks, greens, yellows, blues and mauves are muted with soft greys, as are the creamy off-whites, though she can up the ante, as in Bag Lady, in which the colour has a sharper edge.

While colour and tone tend to calm things down, the paintings are pacey, put together with sweeping strokes, abrupt, angular rhythms and gestural precision. Everything is contested, as though an argument is being pursued. There are no easy effects, no half-measures, rather a searching liveliness and intensity.

In Uncertain Sins at the Solomon Gallery, Charlie Whisker has been burning the midnight oil again. Again because the work re-acquaints us with the same troubled, interior landscape as before. Our viewpoint is that of an unseen, anxious protagonist sitting at a table in the early hours. The surface is variously occupied by a range of telling props, some obviously "real", others that may well be hallucinations, or fantasies.

The recognisably real things include the half-finished glass of whiskey, the teacup, pills, cigarette butts, spent matches, cake, envelopes. So far we're talking still life, is not exactly as we know it. Things get stranger, though. The table surface becomes the site for some potentially sinister objects - hammer, gun, elastic snakes used as luggage restraints, a huge bone, numbered pieces of paper - arranged according to some obscure symbolism.

We have the sense of someone not so much planning for some future event, more mulling obsessively over the disasters of a past that cannot be undone. There is a nervy intensity to Whisker's way of putting all this together. He likes stark, graphic effects and a cold, raking light, with the occasional burst of strident colour. There are some interesting departures from this formula, including the intriguing Eight Women.

Usually Walter Verling's paintings are shown in the midst of work by countless other artists, at the RHA annual exhibition. His current exhibition, at the Belltable Arts Centre in Limerick, is something very different, and different, as well, from a conventional solo show. It gathers together pictures that he has, for one reason or another, held onto over the years, and it is very densely hung, with great clusters of paintings, many of them unmounted and unframed.

The result is terrific, like a glimpse into his studio, perhaps, with dozens of ideas on the go. He describes himself accurately as a "plein air painter directly in the tradition begun by Corot". At his best his work has that sense of having captured the endless complications of a particular scene within the strict limitations of a perfectly disciplined palette and composition. There are many gems in the show, and you can see why he liked to hold onto them.

For an insight into how a landscape painter puts a picture together, as much as for the sheer pleasure of the pictures, go see this show.