THE current two man show of prints by Diramuid Delargy and Alfonso Lopez Monreal is not a place to wander if you feel anything less than supremely confident about your art history.
Both Belfast based print makers have evolved graphic styles which push the tradition of Western art into the foreground, slipping into their complex prints a flotilla of painterly references running from Piero della Francesca, Poussin, Goya and Courbet to Gauguin, Picasso and maybe even Jack Yeats.
And it is not only painters who find themselves bound up in these allusive matrixes of ink and scholarship. Saints, sinners, allegorical animals and writers from Paul Muldoon to Samuel Beckett are all tossed into the mix. This is not art that wears its learning lightly.
Delargy's prints are taken from a decade of practice and follow the progress of the artist from meticulous etchings to later works in which he extravagantly fuses virtuoso hatching techniques with mezzotint and aqua tint.
As Delargy's techniques have advanced, so his subject matter has shifted from strange landscapes of private, sombre allegory to less personal subject matter, culminating in a set of frankly underpowered illustrations for Beckett's From An Abandoned Work.
The work on show from Monreal also charts a decade in the artist's life, though the style of Las Dos Juanas from 1986 remains relatively consistent with that of this year's Milagro Am Oroso. Nevertheless, easily the most attractive of Monreal's images, such as What is Time to a Pig, were produced in the 1980s, when his wispy sweeps rendered human flesh and muscles as though they were the petals of a capriciously intricate rose.
