Aidan Dunne reviews Kirsty Whiten & N.I.C.J.O.B. 5th @ Guinness Storehouse, Dublin, until March 16th (01-4084800) Gemma Browne: Sugar-Coated at tje Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin andLiam Belton at the Peppercanister Gallery.
Kirsty Whitens's work at 5th @ Guinness Storehouse consists of a series of finely worked pencil drawings and one large painting. They are all intense, slightly unsettling character portraits in which the subjects, often depicted in pairs, are isolated against blank grounds.
The format and the poses are photographic in that they draw on the conventions of the family snapshot as well as more studied forms of photographic portraiture, and the images are also photographic in the sense that the graphite is worked obsessively, to present a smooth, photographic sheen.
The level of finish is intentionally excessive, however, so that rather than thinking how like the real thing a particular image is, you're inclined to get the feeling that something is wrong. And it certainly is. Aspects of the poses or demeanour of Whiten's characters can be just a little off key or they can, and in many cases do, verge on the grotesque. There is never any sign that they themselves are aware of this, wrapped up as they are in their own private dramas.
Her titles are as finicky and exact as her method of drawing, adding to the overall sense of demented precision.
Fiancée Nearing Maturity is a typically sharp little study of a creepy, self-satisfied man looming over his diminutive fiancée as though she is a house plant.
Sometimes it is a minor but disturbing impropriety that gives the game away, as with the Right-on Mum with her skirt incongruously hoisted.
Whiten has a distinctive vision and her work is compelling and unpredictable. The obsessive finish and visual quirkiness of her drawings recall aspects of adolescent styles of doodling.
Gemma Browne, whose Sugar-Coated is at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, also refers to an adolescent world. Her identikit portraits of young women suggest a yearning to achieve a particular, perfect image. But there is an implication that this image, in its uniformity, amounts to a kind of blankness.
Details vary from face to face, but the same pair of eyes always seem to stare out at us. Each image is rendered in a bold, gestural manner not unlike Marlene Dumas's style of drawing with a brush, though without her elan. The cumulative, trancelike quality of Browne's variations on an image is an intrinsic part of what her work is about, but at the same time this is her second show in this relatively narrow vein, and it's reasonable to wonder how she is going to extend or progress this basic template.
There is no particular connection between Whiten and her co-exhibitor at the 5th, N.I.C.J.O.B., or Nicolas Jasmin. He shows a series of short videos created on the basis of sampling. His sources are usually films, from which he lifts and re-edits small sequences, cut to percussive scores and using extensive visual repetition. The process allows him to generate new, alternative narrative moments, as with a surreal piece in which a cowboy registers dismay at the sight of a clutch of flags and a couch covered in stetsons.
The work is diverting in an incidental, undemanding way but never quite gripping - you never get the feeling that he's really onto something. And sometimes the source eclipses the sampled re-edit, as with the dazzling black-and-white cinematography of Kaneto Shindo's film Onibaba. This chiefly serves as a reminder that in the hands of people who know what they're doing, black-and-white film has an inky tonal richness all of its own.
Liam Belton's exhibition at the Peppercanister Gallery is thematically and formally concentrated. He is probably best known as a virtuoso painter of meticulously realistic still lifes with the occasional note of surrealism. But in this case art disguises art and he is carefully subdued and understated in his approach. His subjects are some of the megalithic stone monuments of Ireland, England and Wales. The most famous is Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, and that features in the show, but megaliths are plentiful in Ireland and there are many stunning examples.
Belton has not carried out a systematic survey. He seems to have painted the stones that happened to engage his eye and his imagination. What he has done is to tackle each work, no matter how varied in geographical location or scale, according to a set pattern, with a bleached-out, tonal palette and simplified imagery. Along the way he gets drawn into some interesting textural painting, building up substantial masses of pigment.
For the most part the remarkable durable arrangements of stone stand over vast and empty landscapes. And Belton muses on the emptiness, on occasion flanking his studies of megaliths with blank textural expanses of paint, minimally referring to earth, sea and sky. In fact, a couple of paintings dispense with the motif and leave us with pared-down landscapes punctuated only by a horizon line. These are among the best paintings in the show, and it's particularly good to see them emerge naturally from the context of the surrounding work.
