Visual Arts / Aidan DunneReviewed: Paul Winstanley, Kerlin Gallery until October 12th (01-6709093); Maeve McCarthy, Frederick Gallery, which ended on Friday;Comhghall Casey and Noel Murphy, Gorry Gallery which ended on Friday;Anna Kostenko, Jorgensen Fine Art (01-6619758); Joe Mcgill, Molesworth Gallery until Oct 2nd (01-6791548).
In Paul Winstanley's paintings at the Kerlin, pristine modernist interiors, all clean lines and empty space, offer views of nondescript expanses of coniferous woodland. The spare geometry of the rationalist architecture is set against the encroaching, amorphous mass of the forest. There is a hint of the primeval in these otherwise innocuous forestry plantations, in that they recall the central European forests associated with the romantic paintings of Casper David Friedrich and, further back, with the dark, mystical, underpinnings of German nationalism.
Winstanley emulates photographic effects in his subdued, undemonstrative paintings. They inevitably recall Gerhard Richter's appropriation of the photographic image in painting and, particularly earlier on, Winstanley seemed to emulate Richter's trademark photographic blurring, evident here in the slightly out-of-focus treatment of blocks of woodland and other landscapes details. In fact, there is an almost formulaic feel to the way he incorporates all the right references: order and chaos, nature and culture, photography and painting, presence and absence, as though he is ticking them off on a checklist.
What carries his work is his apparent absorption in what he is doing, his cool technical expertise, his resolute adherence to a tight range of concerns, and his relative subtlety. In a series called Veil, the landscape is framed as though through a proscenium arch and light filters through curtains, veiling and even obscuring completely what lies beyond. Walter Gropius's Balcony, with its partly opaque window, similarly suggests both a vantage point and the impossibility of seeing clearly. Winstanley's unpeopled spaces suggest the absent observer, more ominously evoked in earlier studies of empty waiting and meeting rooms, blandly generic interiors that implied an ebbing of individual autonomy.
As it happens, his show coincides with a wave of exhibitions of representational painting throughout several Dublin galleries. None of the others evidences his degree of conceptual or technical sophistication, but all of them have at least some points of interest. Notably, Maeve McCarthy at the Frederick makes still lifes and studies of a shoreline landscape.
The latter recall Edward Hopper's paintings, particularly his watercolours of Cape Cod and other coastal locations, with their sensitivity to light and texture - there is the same feeling of light being something plastic and palpable that you get in Hopper's work. For most of the time, the sea in McCarthy's paintings does not look as if it is composed of water - you are in no doubt that it is blue paint - but the pictures still work. She has an eye for narrow, oblique views of spaces and angles that lead us into the pictures and suggest psychological complexities.
Her studies of fish and shellfish, fruit and vegetables and packaged consumer goods such as milk, all treated as individual, isolated motifs, are more straightforward and, while technically adept, are a bit like academic exercises.
The same could be said of Comhghall Casey's studies of fruit and vegetables at the Gorry Gallery. Perhaps there is a big demand for small studies of foodstuffs as attractive kitchen paintings.
There are hints in Casey's paintings that he might share some of the concerns evident in Charles Brady's treatment of similar subject matter, but overall the careful, preparatory quality of his work suggests that he is still finding his voice. Again, he is a technically able painter, and a patient, methodical one, and it will be interesting to see where his instincts lead him.
At the same gallery, Noel Murphy's sepia-toned figurative paintings have a consciously fusty, anachronistic quality.
They evoke a curiously self-contained world of literary introspection, something enhanced by his penchant for theatrical props and costumes, and his practice of giving allegorical titles to portrait studies.
In several paintings, his male subjects, including himself, tend to come across as rather preciously self-regarding and self-absorbed. His female subjects, however, have individuality and personality about them. It is also notable that Murphy does not academicise or otherwise shy away from the eroticism of undressed or partially undressed figures.
Anna Kostenko, who shows landscape and figure studies at Jorgensen Fine Art, is an example of an artist ambushed by her own facility. She obviously has plenty of facility. She can draw, paint, has an instinct for pattern, composition and texture, but when it comes to the point often settles for easy decorative effects and formulaic solutions to pictorial problems. There is more to her work than that, but she doesn't tend to give it much breathing space - not that there is anything wrong with making decorative paintings.
Joe Mcgill, at the Molesworth, is known for his liking for puns. So, we have a tap bolted to a stone, dripping blood, titled The Arts Council, a figure in a tub covered with a blanket titled Blanket Bath, a Bosnian windchime fashioned from spent cartridge cases. It is an approach that has won him many admirers.
People respond to the puns, they like the way they can get the joke and see the point of the image in both paintings and sculpture. The problem is that the literalness of this tends to diminish the work in the long-term in the way that a joke is funny the first time but successively less so if you hear it again and again.
