Reviewed:
Vivienne Roche, Rubicon Gallery until October 28th (016708055); Chroma, Brian Kennedy, Original Print (Dublin, 016773657) and Fenton (Cork, 021-4315294) Galleries until October 27th and October 28th respectively Geraldine O'Neill, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until October 28th (01-8740064); Creating the Atmosphere, Helen Richmond, Hallward Gallery until October 19th (016621482); First Foot, Paul Kane Gallery until October 21st (01-6703141)
Inventively varied in form and materials but constant in its underlying concerns, Vivienne Roche's new work at the Rubicon elaborates on the ideas and metaphors she explored in her collaborative project (with composer John Buckley) Tidal Erotics.
These hinge on an unforced anthropomorphism in forms and images derived from the close, continuous observation of the boundary surfaces where sea meets land. The patterns of waves, of water on sand, of seaweed and imprinted seaweed, together with the physical properties of these substances, all come into play.
The mood of undulating, tender eroticism that characterised Tidal Erotics is continued here by a variety of means, from the ripple-surfaced Countercur- rents which couples bronze and glass, sand and sea, as penetrative and accommodating forms.
The seaweed-based Tenuto is a tight cluster of intense sensation. Adagio is a sculptural drawing, a schematic bronze stave with thorns as notes.
Heart Stones confirms Roche's tactful precision as a draughtswoman. She has made a thoughtful, immensely assured show, without any sign of complacency, with, rather, a constant eagerness to explore new possibilities.
The prints in Brian Kennedy's Chroma, at both the Original Print and Fenton Galleries, create their effects by building intersections and overlaps of tight ranges of muted, sonorous colours within a few, unvarying formats.
Yet, though the formats may not vary, everything else does. Colour is space, atmosphere is everything, in prints that exude a magisterial authority. Kennedy's work has never looked so calmly accomplished.
He brokers meetings between both harmonious and close-tocomplementary colours, artfully exploiting the quietness of concord and the zing of conflict to produce beautifully meditative but also enlivening pieces.
There is a continual, shuttling movement to the compositions, but they are invariably stabilised by the large central expanses and by juxtapositions of colour. He draws on references from Ad Reinhardt to more recent varieties of abstraction, but he has managed to map out his own distinctive slice of the terrain.
Geraldine O'Neill's still lifes, at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, are pictures of excess. Delivered in a boldly confident style of heightened, urgent realism, all manner of things crowd into the frames in promiscuous jumbles.
She turns the genre into a greedily acquisitive eye, pressing everything into service: besides the traditional fruit, flowers, vegetables and game, there are preserves, potted plants, confectionery, tools of the painter's trade, children's drawings and much, much more. What makes it continually engaging is that everything she uses becomes a means of testing and stretching the limits of the genre. A depiction of two real roses roughly held by packing tape against rose-patterned wallpaper becomes a Hanging Garden.
Similarly, trowel and secateurs lie against floral-patterned paper. Bananas and ice-cream cones become real motifs in repeat patterns. Two dead swallows are laid against a picture of a sky. O'Neill comes across as fast, inventive and witty.
Jenny Richardson, at the Ashford, also paints still life. Her small, concentrated studies of fruit and vegetables have a wonderful, considered presence. She is thoroughly at home dealing with humble, individual items - a head of cabbage, a lettuce, a few strawberries, a china bowl full of eggs - against plain domestic grounds.
When she tackles more expansive subjects, in studies of animals and landscapes, she is a little less comfortable, though her landscapes do vividly convey the surging power of the sea, and there is always tremendous warmth and directness to her work.
In Creating the Atmosphere at the Hallward Gallery, Helen Richmond concentrates on skies, taking on such hackneyed material as glowing Atlantic sunsets and succeeds by doing as she usually does: telling it straight.
She is a capable painter committed to painting what she sees, and her accounts of the strange activities in the sky, the almost surreal business of varied layers of cloud forming, dissipating and moving, are striking and engrossing.
For the most part she inclines towards a close-to-photographic finish in her desire to describe, but it is notable that in her much freer pastels, like Whirling Foam, what looks up close like a mass of scribbled, random strokes resolves itself into something almost seamlessly photographic with a little distance.
Her faith in eye and hand is quite warranted. There is also some beautiful, subtle colour in these pastels - flushes of pink and green.
Best known as a printmaker, Niall Naessens shows a series of seascapes painted on slate in a two-person show at the Paul Kane Gallery. Views of Dublin Bay from Howth and Bray, they are tightly crafted, very strong on formalising unruly natural phenomena into crisply defined patterns, stylised without becoming at all laboured. He shares the gallery with Carlow-born Brian Garvey, one of a number of interesting young figurative painters. His muted, controlled, fragmentary figure studies occupy a space somewhere between Luc Tuymans and Francis Bacon with, notably, something of the latter's kinetic energy invested in the images.
