Reviewed: Gemma Browne: Being Pretty Is Everything, Draíocht, Blanchardstown, until March 16th (01-8852610) Niamh Moran: Monotypes, Draíocht, Blanchardstown, until March 16th (01-8852610) Semi-Detached, Original Print Gallery, Dublin, until February 28th (01- 6773657) Eoin MacLochlainn: Lorg, Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until February 28th (01- 6617286) John Brennan: Winter Journal, Hallward Gallery, Dublin, until tomorrow (01-6621482) Emma Williams: New Works, The Art Store, Dublin, until March 9th (01- 6727284)
In Being Pretty Is Everything, Gemma Browne has stocked the walls of Draíocht's ground-floor gallery with close-ups of the faces of young women. Different women but, as the show's title suggests, also the same in their obsessive, relentless expression of a desire to embody a version of feminine beauty. Each face stares at us, wide-eyed, direct, anxious to be recognised. But recognised as who or what? The implication is that each identity dissolves in a vision of generic desirability.
Browne worked not from life but from second-hand sources, scouring magazines to find appropriate faces. It could be argued that, by reworking these highly processed and contrived images by hand, with all the fallibility and gestural freedom it entails, she is restoring the vitality and individuality sacrificed in pursuit of a notional ideal, but the point is not dogmatically pressed. Certainly, the warmth, humanity and quirkiness of her drawn and painted images make them consistently engaging. A studied simplicity of approach recalls the stylised drawings of adolescents. The work of Marlene Dumas also comes to mind, although Browne does not have her technical flair.
In the upper gallery, Niamh Moran's monoprints conjure up a world of childhood. There is an agreeably easy-going quality to her evocation of the magic of such apparently mundane activities as swimming, running and playing. She skilfully captures the imagination of a child, as the world is experienced in terms of pleasures, mysteries and parameters imposed by adult diktat. Through repetition and overlapping, her images build into a cumulative and consistent narrative, like a memory of summer holidays.
Semi-Detached, at the Original Print Gallery, is a thematic show with a loosely defined theme, one relating roughly to the psychology of city life. It features work by three artists. Yvonne McGuinness juxtaposes a lengthy video of a sunset with three garishly coloured prints depicting individuals or groups of people looking at something unseen - a catastrophe, or perhaps just a sunset. On the floor beneath each print is a pool of ink, as though leaking from the images, which reinforces a sense of unease or anxiety that runs through the installation.
Margaret O'Brien's silk-screen-on-aluminium prints combine documentary-like images with what look like genetic print-outs. There is an air of aftermath to her studies of a flat- dweller clearing up the morning after a party. The seediness is authentically conveyed, and the titles' emphasis on dirt and rubbish, together with the fragments of genetic codes, evoke ideas of genetic fingerprinting and genetic engineering. Frank Kiely's photographed recreations of Parisian landmarks, roughly fashioned from recycled rubbish, have flair but are not quite sharply enough executed.
John Brennan's Winter Journal, at the Hallward Gallery, consists of a series of abstracted landscapes. The segmented, grid-based compositions are dominated by a mostly horizontal grain and, with atmospheric colouring, impart a vivid sense of space and light, of a landscape scoured and textured by the elements.
This format to a certain extent seems repetitious, but only because there are too many works in the show. Edit the 29 paintings down to about 18 and the impression would be much stronger. Apart from that, Brennan is to be applauded for formulating and continually refining a judiciously spare formal language. His three Season's Account paintings are very good, and he only really falters when he ups the scale significantly for Winter Journal.
The paintings in Eoin MacLochlainn's Lorg, at the Ashford Gallery, take the thumbprint as their starting point. The linear patterns are rendered in vibrant colours. This procedure, coincidentally, is not a million miles from that used by Patrick Scott in several of his tapestry designs, some of which are on view as part of his retrospective at the Hugh Lane Gallery. And it has to be said that Scott uses the idea with greater clarity and zeal.
By comparison, MacLochlainn's works are agreeable but rather slack. There is the occasional flash of interesting colour combinations, but by and large you feel the artist is less than fully engaged. The suggestion that the arbitrary conjunctions of colour in some way symbolise our essential sameness, regardless of race, creed or colour, is less than convincing.
Emma Williams, at the Art Store, shows a group of still-life paintings. They are straightforwardly decorative and colourful, boldly designed and briskly made. The painter's background in textiles comes through in her flair for pictorial design. It is a pity that she uses acrylic, which here tends to dry to an inert surface. The vibrancy of her colour schemes is diminished by this, but perhaps something as simple as a few coats of varnish would restore a little lustre.
