Fergus Feehily

THIS new gallery space features exposed roof beams and rough bricks, only half obscured by three enormous screen walls, painted…

THIS new gallery space features exposed roof beams and rough bricks, only half obscured by three enormous screen walls, painted in prim whitewash. Onto these clean, chic walls, Fergus Feehily's images have been fixed as if by magic.

The deep wooden edges of Feehily's paintings seem to suggest some screw snapping bulk, but at closer range, their softly coloured surfaces evoke lightness and liquidity, with a mesh of thousands of minute brushmarks of muted colours coaxed into sailing quietly together across smooth wood or anonymous MDF.

Hints of other Irish artists with unexpectedly tenacious allegiances to high modernism, such as Ciaran Lennon or Fergus Martin, abound in Feehily's technique. But while those other painters seem to be toiling with vivid ideas in a familiar language, Feehily does not. There is little in this calm work that is either conceptually resonant, or technically accomplished enough to offer any persuasive "case for painting".