John Lalor is a Dublin-born painter who has, since 1988, been living and working in Paris. This is his first showing in Dublin in nearly 10 years and it includes a large body of recent work as well as paintings from previous periods in his career.

Even given this span of years, Lalor's shifts in style are considerable and confusing. Above all, they seem to bear witness to a painter who has travelled down more than his share of blind alleys.

The history of painting seems to weigh heavily on Lalor. One painting, a tortured, spectral, crimson body, gradually entombed under a welter of dark strokes, is labelled "after Giacometti", while a clearly-related diptych, King and Queen, shows two similar figures engaged in the same struggle to escape the darkness.

His latest work never quite shakes off the influence of Giacometti, nor indeed of Bacon; there is also a harmful savour of Le Brocquy to the whole project. This may be because the drama in Lalor's images is undeveloped, but it may also result from the painter's apparently growing aversion to finessing his images and his obvious attraction to awkward couplings and sullen dynamics.

These recent oil-on-board works feature pale yellow grounds, sometimes topped with an oddly-cropped portrait of the artist, his mother, his father, or an unnamed woman, sometimes left inexplicably unadorned.

The most extraordinary of the artist's decisions, however, has been to enclose even the smallest of his paintings in heavy, swollen, pipe-like black frames which in almost every case casually overwhelm the images within.