Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: Set amid the semi-dereliction of a decaying public housing block, Margaret O'Brien's Sea of Unknowing is a work that gives the term "site-specific" a renewed relevance.
Everything about the hard, battered- looking environment, from the dripping concrete stairwell to the boarded-up flats and the whole crowded vista south across the city, acts as a foil to the pristine interior world that O'Brien has created. This obsessively ordered world resides behind the armoured facade of a third-floor unit in Sean Tracey House.
Except for one darkened room, in which a strip light crackles noisily (it's amplified), occasionally flaring into life only to fade immediately, the space is immaculately, startlingly white. In the living room, the wallpaper pattern has become disconcertingly articulated, mutating into an infestation of moving clock hands. Look inside the cupboard in an empty bedroom and you encounter row upon row of nails hammered neatly into the walls. The spiky aggression and carefully channelled, contained violence of this arrangement is perhaps related to the compulsive need for order and control evident throughout: overwhelming feelings held at bay via ritual.
O'Brien's installation can be seen as both a living space and an inner, mental space. It's amazing how easily you can respond to it as one or the other. Clearly it addresses issues arising from the anonymity and isolation of urban life, how the apparently ordinary can spiral off into pervasive anxiety and insecurity, how coping can mutate into obsessiveness, minor unease into alienation. The effectiveness of her work depends on the high production values necessary to generate a contrast between the outside and the inside and, in the event, it is all incredibly well done, and it makes a memorable addition to the honourable roll call of Pallas Heights projects.
Jack Donovan, at the Cross Gallery, is in tremendous form. The paintings in the show run through the gamut of his habitual preoccupations. A series of floral still lifes in the first room, poised and assured, eases our way into his theatre of the cruel and the absurd. His cast of familiar performers - including clowns, edgily sexual nudes, Jacobites and mythological figures (though no clergy this time) - is put through its paces, enacting a variety of dramas for our entertainment. But, as ever with Donovan, the tables are sometimes turned and the performers become observers of our human comedy.
There is a very good account of The Death of Art O'Leary plus excellent versions of other characteristic subjects, including Leda and the Swan, Pinkie Downey and a riotous Women of Limerick. Donovan aims for simple pictorial statements. So much so that one can underestimate the exceptional breadth of his subject matter and, indeed, the skill that goes into the creation of paintings of such formal clarity and elegance.
The seven Recent Graduates 2005 at the Ashford Gallery are all from NCAD. Without question, there was a significant number of impressive artists graduating from NCAD and other colleges this year, and curator Mark St John Ellis has gone for painting and drawing. Mind you, Nadja Haefeli, who is Swiss, worked in a variety of media in her graduation show. Here we see a series of oil sketches of stereotypical views of Swiss scenery and architecture, representations of representations that evidence her interest in the emergence of a national iconography and the commodification of cultural identity.
For Atsushi Kaga, a rabbit, depicted in a spare, cartoonish idiom, is a kind of alter ego, a means of addressing, for example, emotionally charged subjects at one emotional remove. There is a nice, dreamy quality to his evocation of a coherent rabbit-world. In their different ways, both Leda Scully and Kate Warner are painters in a pared-down, oblique manner that is cautious and quizzical, taking nothing for granted but also ambitious in its evident conviction that painting offers a useful avenue of approach to the world.
Jonathan Mayhew and Mandy Russell exemplify a current trend toward composite works that suggest a multiplicity of possibilities and interpretations, rejecting the hierarchical patterns of conventional pictorial structure. Eoin McHugh's drawings, which can also function as ensembles, have a retro quality, recalling past styles of illustration. They have an explanatory intent, but the procedures and events that they set about explaining quickly become obscure and perplexing, even disturbing. One would be happy to see what any of these artists do next.
Sahoko Blake's drawings and paintings, in a Dalkey Arts show that is just concluding, are exceptionally precise studies of the figure, plus a smaller number of landscapes. Blake is best known for her figure drawings, and the landscapes are in a way the more surprising because usually, in her figurative work, she eschews descriptive backgrounds, isolating bodies against plain grounds to give them even, careful consideration. Mind you, one of the best pieces in the show reverses this approach, relishing an abundance of background patterns and forms, including a floral-patterned armchair supporting a relaxed nude figure.
There is an unflinching, intent aspect to Blake's observation of the body that could invite comparison with Lucian Freud. Like him, for example, she doesn't shy away from the realistic depiction of genitalia. But her work is more like the earlier Freud in its calm, unshowy attentiveness. The figures in her charcoal studies can have a sturdy, architectonic form, whereas she generally uses oil paint very thinly, lending the skin a greater sense of lightness, the feeling that it is a fine, translucent membrane. There is no doubting the exceptional quality of her work.
Sea of Unknowing, Margaret O'Brien, Pallas Heights until Oct 29, by appointment, 087-9572232/ 087-9677394/085-1369797; Recent Graduates 2005, Ashford Gallery until Oct 27, 01-6617286; Jack Donovan: Paintings, Cross Gallery until Oct 26 01-4738978; Sahoko Blake: Paintings and Drawings, Dalkey Arts until Oct 21, 01-2849663
