The work of the Australian-born artist Toba Khedoori has a strange effect on Galleries I and II of the RHA. Khedoori makes drawings. You could say she makes drawings on a huge scale; in fact, although the composite paper sheets that make up her work are indeed vast, the images usually occupy only a small proportion of the space. And she avoids compositions as such, usually floating single motifs against background expanses.
Yet the six works that form her show are a perfect fit for the galleries that contain them. They weren't, but they might have been made for the space.
Her schematic images are all related to space, and most feature individual architectonic details or structures. A door, a window, a stairway, a sequence of receding rooms, a pair of receding walls (the latter have an epic, Great Wall of China quality about them). One conjures up a horizon line through the simple expedient of drawing horizontal lines at diminishing intervals. Some of the images are impeccably made.
The window, for example, is a polished, technical-looking drawing. Others, however, have an awkwardness, notably the staircase, which, like several other motifs, sits against a filmy white background. This uniform whitish background, which looks as it is was made by the brusque, gestural application of wax and white oil pigment, differentiates the artist's working space from the limits of the big rolls of paper that act as her support, and from the surrounding gallery space.
You could say that it also initiates a dialogue with the gallery space, in that it seems to echo it, or perhaps form an equivalent to it. "A dialogue with the surrounding space" is a cliché of contemporary art commentary, but if you see Khedoori's show you will probably agree that it applies here. As you take in her doors or windows, your eyes are likely to flick involuntarily around at the fabric of the gallery itself.
It is not so clear that anything particularly fruitful emerges from this dialogue, but a conversation is in progress. There is an agreeably casual air to the drawings. They are stapled loosely to the wall, with no attempt to disguise their composite nature. Their wax surfaces, in the making and perhaps subsequently, have attracted dust, stray hairs and whatever, and are scattered with irregular lumps and splashes of wax.
If the drawings come across as not designed specifically for the RHA, they are designed for a generic contemporary museum space. That is, a cavernous exhibition arena. And they address such an arena. They immediately open other spatial possibilities, playing with instances of illusionistic possibility but never quite committing themselves to them. The representational elements thwart any incipient temptation to read them in an abstract or minimal way, though some of the qualities ally them with such works, particularly in the case of the horizon drawing.
A more obvious point of reference is the work of the surrealist René Magritte. Despite their monumental scale, Khedoori's drawings ultimately come across as interesting footnotes to his metaphysically unsettling renditions of our ordinary, everyday world.
The Korean artist Kim en Joong's gestural abstracts at the Taylor Galleries are upbeat, likeable paintings. With their veils and splashes of colour and their prominent use of a white background, they recall the work of the American painter Sam Francis. Joong's paintings have a dancing, centrifugal energy.
Francis, who died in 1994, was a Californian and, temperamentally, definitely a West Coast painter. He was able to take the emotionally charged apparatus of abstract expressionism and imbue it with cool.
He had strong links with Europe and with Japan, where he was significantly influenced by traditional art practices, including the haboku, or "flung ink", style. Although freely gestural and highly coloured, en Joong's paintings have a comparable air of detachment. Beyond a certain buoyancy of mood, it is as though everything about their grammar is emotional but that, as pieces, they are at one remove from actual emotion.
This changes somewhat in a series of smaller, more thickly textured and densely worked panels. Here, comparatively earthbound, en Joong allows the colour to get muddier at times and becomes engaged with compositional questions that are often simply dispensed with in the larger works. While it is an efficient, likeable show, one would like a little more.
Margaret Egan's Breaking Horizons, at the Ashford Gallery, has proved to be extremely popular. Her acrylic paintings, landscapes for the most part, with some still lifes, are bold and vigorously made. What is appealing about them is that the artist seems to relish her freedom, seems to have enjoyed making them and has imparted her enjoyment to the finished products.
She likes expansive views of tempestuous skies over lively seas, and boldly coloured landscapes, the former drawn from the Irish coast, the latter from the south of France. She paints fairly thinly, thinly enough to maintain a feeling of fluidity and fluency. It may sound patronising to describe the work as undemanding, but while it is modest in its aspirations, it more than lives up to them, and doesn't pretend to be anything more.
Reviewed
Toba Khedoori, RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, until February 24th (01-6612558)
Kim en Joong, Taylor Galleries, Dublin, until Saturday (01-6766055)
Breaking Horizons, Margaret Egan, RHA Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until January 31st (01-6617286)
