Reviewed:

BT Made in Japan, Richard Gorman, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, until September 2nd (02890321402)

Richard Gorman, New Paintings, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast, until September 15th (048-90235245)

Richard Gorman currently has two exhibitions running in Belfast, one at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, approaching the end of its run, and the other at the Fenderesky, just begun. Both feature abstract paintings that are notably economic in terms of their expressive means: flat, abstract forms against flat grounds. Abstraction, say its detractors, tends to be, to a greater or lesser degree, "decorative" - a pejorative term - and open to ideological appropriation. Abstract paintings are viewed as being tainted by their Modernist associations, and as manifesting a disturbing blankness, an absence; this is not seen as something positive, a space of potential and perhaps clarity.

Yet for the most part, rather than denoting a lack of effort and involvement, this space is achieved with much difficulty. You could say that Gorman's work concerns a process of clarification. Following it chronologically over the last decade, we begin by negotiating dense thickets of gestural brushwork, of visual and verbal references, the latter typically featuring Joycean puns worked into the titles, all suggesting multiplicities of meaning.

These paintings seem to extrapolate from Abstract Expressionism, but the palette is always muted and atmospheric, the attitude slightly distanced and cool - though not ironically distanced. The leap from this starting point to the pared-down forms and palette of the work that forms his two Belfast exhibitions is dramatic, but there are continuities as well as contrasts, in the form of his colour and tonal sense, the rhythmic elegance of his forms and the crisp, painterly touch.

As Gorman saw it, one problem with using source images and referential titles was that people might look for and focus on the putative narrative or object rather than the image, think about what the painting was of rather than the painting itself.

For Gorman, while the paintings are not representations of something else, they are objects in the world that are as open to association as anything else, and he is quite agreeable to them accruing their own histories, and to people bringing their own associations to them.

Made in Japan, at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, exclusively comprises works on paper. Last year he spent some time at a small, family-run paper-making business, Iwano Heyzaburo in Imadate in western Japan. He was there because the workshop produces exceptionally large sheets of handmade washi paper, and he wanted to make a series of large paper paintings, as well as smaller sheets to work on later with gouache. What's different about the large-format works is that each one is of a piece. That is, it is not painted in the conventional sense of the term, but the colour is applied in the manufacturing stage, in the form of dyed paper pulp.

In the accompanying catalogue, Gorman provides a beautifully written, entirely self-deprecating account of the complex process, and speaks of the odd, ultimately exhausting experience of not being sure, because of language and other barriers, exactly what is going on for much of the time. Yet the works that emerged betray nothing of the uncertainty and improvisation that informed their making.

At a late stage, for example, the paper-makers tell him that he can only use straight-edged, angular forms. But curves are essential to what he wants to do, so on the spot they devise a way to make curves, and it works extremely well.

The washi paintings are both delicate and tough. Delicate because of the airy translucence of the colour fields, and tough because the washi paper is beautiful, substantial, sculptural stuff in itself, thick and textured, with ragged edges. Gorman remarks that he had to choose colours on the basis of wet, and hence dark, refrigerated samples yet, remarkably, he managed to select colours that conform to his own distinctive palette, with its sonorous harmonies.

He has a long association with Japan. This has never really amounted to a professed engagement with Japanese culture or aesthetics, though it is reasonable to see some Eastern influence in his predilection for spare, uncluttered forms and his concentration on the act of making a painting - how the finished piece encapsulates the moment of the action.

Yet in this respect it is instructive to recall that Kikuo Ohkouchi, of the Itami City Museum, wrote that seeing Gorman's work reminded him of his first experience of the landscape of north-western Ireland, with its formidable expanses of bogland, sea, cliffs and sky: landscapes composed of huge expanses of grey-toned, muted colours. The recent paintings at the Fenderesky are minimal in form, usually employing just two flat colours and consisting of simple planar divisions, of interrupted forms, usually with just one or two forms against a ground. They go from the relative complexity of Green Japan, which boasts no less than four tones and three colours and hinges on a centrifugal force (and is a particularly good painting), to Blue, Light, which consists of one anomalous, curved blue geometric form, precariously balanced against a blue-grey ground. While this work simply outlines one form against a rectangular ground, it continually engages the eye in figuring out its play of balance.

Gorman's work, with its exceptional exploratory vitality, reminds us that abstract painting is still very much at home in the world, not a stranger to it.