Visual Arts: Reviewed are and so on..., Marc Reilly, Paul Kane Gallery until Nov 19 (087-6478423); Passing Through, Glucksman Gallery until Jan 29 021-4901844; William Crozier, paintings, Fenton Gallery until Nov 25 021-4315294
Up to the point of its temporary closure about three and a half years ago, the Paul Kane Gallery had established itself as a welcome and distinctive presence among Dublin's commercial galleries. Then it became impossible for Kane to retain his very nice South William Street location. Other events intervened and what he had intended as a six-month sabbatical for relocation stretched into a considerably longer time. Given the exceptional quality of the gallery's new address, perhaps it was worth the wait, much as he has been missed in the exhibition calendar. The two ground floor rooms of No 6, Merrion Square are on a palatial scale, affording generous wall space and a beautiful ambience.
The gallery is now on its third solo show in its new venue and is settling in very well. All have not only been good shows - Leonard Shiel, Megan Eustace and now Marc Reilly - but have also demonstrated Kane's willingness to test the space. Eustace, for example, is primarily a graphic artist, and her drawings, from small to very large scale, have a nervy, kinetic quality that infused the space with a balletic liveliness.
Marc Reilly's and so on . . . is a substantial show easily absorbed by this space. While the work alternates between what looks like pure abstraction and representational landscape, there is a unifying thread. This has to do with Reilly's use of materials, which is very much in the moment, immediate, spontaneous, and in turn relates to his preoccupation with time. Each piece or composite piece is presented as a record of a time. Each slice of Wicklow landscape is anchored to a specified moment - well, hour or so - and ties us directly to that moment.
Reilly throws himself into each work with complete commitment. But of course that is no guarantee that it's going to be any good. What we see in the gallery is the cream of the crop, and some of the water-colour landscapes are terrific, teeming with life, packed with incident in a way that recalls Nick Miller's fantastically detailed accounts of burgeoning growth in the countryside.
Where the landscapes are generally busy, the abstract records of days and years offer us other, perhaps more contemplative kinds of spaces - though offering the viewer a space is always the name of the game. Reilly's show is good and, more, aims to deal directly with what it is to be alive.
Passing Through at the Glucksman Gallery in Cork marshals work by selected graduates of the Crawford College of Art and Design from 1975 to this year. "Selected" is the word, for it's a fairly tight selection, by Patrick T Murphy, the director of the RHA Gallagher Gallery. It may, in other words, leave out many worthy artists who have come through the Crawford, but it is the way to devise an effective show, and the show is generally strong and makes a good calling card for the Crawford: chances are the very strong line-up includes artists you didn't realise graduated there.
The college has a reputation as a haven for artists committed to traditional painting and sculpture media and, while they are well represented, it is worth noting that video and, to a lesser extent, photography also feature.
Mention traditional sculptural media in relation to the Crawford and the name that springs to mind is Michael Quane, a stone carver whose singular vision and tremendous technical ability have engendered an exceptional body of work with more than a hint of Gothic about it.
Great manual skills are also apparent among the rest of a formidable bunch of sculptors, including Eilis O'Connell, Vivienne Roche and Marie Foley. Ditto Maud Cotter who, untypically, shows an engagingly discursive installation that seems to wander into the category of abjection. Claire Curneen's Barbara and her Tower has interesting echoes of the kind of mythic narrative important in the work of Marie Foley and, even more so, Alice Maher, the latter represented here by the thick, luxuriant tresses of Andromeda.
Billy Foley, Gemma Browne and Simon English are all estimable painters with significantly different approaches. Martin Healy shows one of his most striking photographic images from his exploration of the contemporary myth of the New Jersey Demon.
Among the video pieces, Aissa Lopez's What do you Want from Me?, demonstrates what it is to be a good listener, George Bolster's The Washing of the Body is an audacious and serious attempt to address religious iconography and Vivienne Griffin's Sleep is conceptually neat. Lopez, Bolster and Yvonne McGuinness's work suffers from lacklustre presentation and appalling sound quality. It's hard to know whether the fault lies with the videos themselves or the set-up in the gallery.
Joy Gerrard and Linda Quinlan complement each other nicely in ambitious pieces that use sculptural ideas to stretch the bounds. Gerrard aims to convey a sense of a complex, urban, perhaps inhuman environment. Comparably, Quinlan's You're Giving Too Much Away is a striking installation that conveys a sense of a strange, hybridised world, a mix of the everyday, of virtual reality, various kinds of technological manipulation and disturbed or altered vision.
The work in William Crozier's exhibition at the Fenton Gallery features, as we might expect of him, a great deal of intense colour, but it is also exceptionally pared down, as though he is pruning the compositions of anything inessential.
He is candid about his sources: his garden and the wider landscape of west Cork, the incidental still lifes offered in the windows in Ballydehob over Corpus Christi weekend, Provence and a place rediscovered this year, Malaga. He says that being in Malaga "is like having another life or understanding another part of one's nature," which is a good description of his own work, with its enhanced responsiveness to the colour and feeling of place.
While he works often and well with black, including in this exhibition, colour is more and more to the fore as he dispenses with minor detail. Distant Landscape, an exceptionally spare and beautiful work, typifies his sensitive use of pinks, greens and yellows as well as more incendiary colour combinations.
Fans of the painter will find much to admire in this latest instalment of a remarkable journey into colour and light.
