From the lab to the Arizona desert

Reviewed:

Mark Francis, Kerlin Gallery until January 6th (01-6709093); Rock, Stones, Water: Jacqueline Stanley, Hallward Gallery until December 6th (01-6621482); Salto Angel, Clea van der Grijn, Cross Gallery until December 16th (01-4738978); Mirage: Daniel Jewesbury, Project Arts Centre until December 23rd (01-6796622)

Mark Francis established his reputation with ominous looking, near-monochromatic paintings inspired by microbiological photographs of substances like blood, sperm and bacteria. There was something of the aura of the pathology lab about these images, with their sinister masses of dark teeming organisms, even though they were usually choreographed in almost formal patterns. His new work, at the Kerlin Gallery, is a continuation and a distinct development of these concerns.

There is more variety of colour and surface texture, with telling use of a hard, glossy finish and jarring, astringent colours and colour combinations. Francis again evokes biological structures, but in a looser, more general way. Lines snaking through the compositions like cables could well be nerves. Grid-like bands of pigment are allowed to leak in ragged dribbles down the surface. Recurrent, lens-shaped, offset marks might be some other form of cellular unit, but these, together with those drips and other casual markings, suggest a kind of sickly, unhealthy breakdown of structural integrity.

All in all, the pictures could hardly be accused of being too ingratiating. But at the same time, Francis has always had a tendency to be seduced by nice surface effects - all that slick, quasi-photographic paint-sliding - and he hasn't quite overcome that here, as least in one case. The biggest, superficially most visually impressive work in the show, Substratum, certainly looks spectacular and is something of a tour de force, but it doesn't have the rigour of many of the other images, settling a bit too readily for technical sleight of hand. It is a very strong show overall, however, with some fine pieces and varied, interesting and constructive correspondences with aspects of the work of Helen Chadwick, Ian McKeever, Barrie Cooke and even Anselm Kiefer - plus something of Sigmar Polke's ingenious pictorial management.

There are some real gems in Jacqueline Stanley's Rocks, Stones, Water at the Hallward. The show marshals works from home, in the form of studies of Cork landscapes, and abroad, based on trips to Israel and Japan. It seems fair to say that Stanley, with a strong instinct for linear form, pattern and composition, is best known as a fine draughtswoman who uses colour sparingly and well, rather than as a painter per se. The crux of her work is its authoritative, architectonic drawing, and she never loses a sense of excited discovery in translating the complexity of the visual world into linear pattern.

That said, she shows some terrific paintings qua paintings here, including The Blue Pond, with its beautifully atmospheric colouring, and Rocks and Hawk Ascending. In the Japanese work, particularly, she is venturing into territory explored by Elizabeth Blackadder, in the sense that she too sets about synthesising the in-built formality of her drawing style with the formality of Japanese design. In so doing, she acquits herself very well indeed with some excellent studies of gardens.

Clea van der Grijn's Salto Angel, at the Cross Gallery, consists of a series of paintings inspired by a visit to the Angel Falls of the title, a remote waterfall in Venezuela that happens to be the highest in the world. The pictures, with thickened, grafted on textures and a pared down palette dominated by blue, are a considered distillation of the experience.

What struck van der Grijn was the long, increasingly slow approach journey which, together with the sheer strangeness of the place, made the whole thing disorientating and hypnotic. After a flight in a light aircraft, a sluggish canoe trip led to the final mountain trek. The paintings, mostly horizontal in format, concentrate on the dark horizontal ridge of the flat-topped mountains below, the band of sky above and the heavy, inexorable fall of water.

The effect is to hustle us along, to keep us moving towards a climactic encounter with the falls themselves. Van der Grijn is up to the occasion, and the final piece, on the end wall of the gallery's sequence of rooms, is a convincingly muscular evocation of this awesome, elemental place. The show excels as a concentrated, prototypical inward account of this - and indeed any - outward journey.

Daniel Jewesbury's Mirage at the Project Arts Centre is an agreeable, if languid, miscellaneous exploration of the meanings and implications of transplanting a cultural landmark - to wit, London Bridge - from its indigenous setting, the River Thames, to another culture and setting altogether. To, that is, Arizona, where a river was diverted to provide the reconstructed bridge with some vestige of a rationale.

In sandy, sun-baked Arizona, the structure looks more than a little incongruous; in fact, it looks rather sad and lost. Some local voices bemoan the impact of this invasive tourist attraction on the community. In a three-screen video installation, we are also treated to various anecdotal and historical commentaries. The inevitable conclusion is that, transposed as it is, the bridge cannot retain its iconic status. It becomes an abstraction, an oddity.