Reviewed:

Brian Ferran, paintings at Jorgensen Fine Art until April 24th

John Keating, at the Ashford Gallery until March 30th

Leonard Sexton, at the Bridge Gallery until April 4th

Tim Morris, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until April 1st

Gavin Hogg, at the Origin Gallery until March 31st

In their different ways, both Brian Ferran and John Keating filter their work through a glow of retrospection. Ferran's paintings at Jorgensen Fine Art take as their points of reference the stories of Saint Colmcille and Thomas Kinsella's version of The Tain. And, a catalogue note adds, iconographic details are borrowed from stone carvings in Co Fermanagh. The latter presumably refer to the strange, stylised, cartoon-like renderings of heads that Ferran employs as a recurrent motif in groups throughout his work. His use of the heads is absolutely typical, in that he treats them as static, fixed templates to be repeated at will in a variety of contexts. He doesn't vary or develop the head image per se.

That is his basic pictorial method. Disks, squares, crosses and chequerboard grids are deployed in a set of compositional variations, played against sand-textured, atmospheric backgrounds with suggestions of landscape. Dark earth colours occasionally put in an appearance, but generally Ferran's palette veers towards un-naturalistic primaries. His tightly controlled picture management and colour sense recall Charles Harper. Overall, the effect is of a decorative play on Celtic motifs, with a nod towards the devices of Celtic art. He is adept at organising his images, and his work is certainly effective as far as it goes, but it is perhaps overly prescriptive.

At the Ashford Gallery, in Life Fragments, Keating clothes his nudes in masses of creased and crumpled sheets, and in the appearance of antiquity. He ruffles and scrapes the surface of the thick paper and blots it with pools of watercolour to simulate ageing, not in the manner of an unscrupulous dealer staining paper with tea to give it that lived-in look, but to signify time in a knowing way. Similarly, he often depicts bodily fragments, with faces obscured or missing altogether, as though we are looking at surviving fragments or unfinished works.

There is a generalised sensuality to the athletic-looking bodies, male and female, that he depicts, bodies which are often straining or luxuriantly sprawled and sometimes paired, embracing. Fruit plays a sexually symbolic role, as in one rather over-the-top image of a nude male torso, muscles rippling, depicted beyond a pair of female hands proffering an apple: Steady on, Eve. There is another potential level of meaning, however, in the combination of taut flesh and ripe fruit, particularly when viewed in the context of a number of hazy studies of older faces. Taken together all this suggests something like a memento mori, anticipating age, withering and mortality. Keating is certainly a capable draughtsman, but the theatricality of his images can tend towards the overheated.

In a different way Leonard Sexton, at the Bridge Gallery, also places barriers between ourselves and his images, whether they are standing female figures or urban landscapes. He has a real feeling for urban spaces, for the atmosphere of place, just as he has a sense of the physicality of the figure. But he is often a bit too literal in his methodology. Sometimes it seems that he just takes a conventional image and methodically obliterates it with slab-like blocks of grey pigment, until we're left with just enough clues to make sense of it. His female figures stand centrally, facing us in a way that brings Alberto Giacometti and, to a lesser extent, Louis le Brocquy to mind right away. The work has its moments, but perhaps Sexton needs to trust his own instinct a little more.

Tim Morris shows bronzes at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. He has a good sense of form, and he is good at putting forms together. There are two groups of pieces. The larger is a series of vaguely anthropomorphic totems, each with a particular theme indicated by its title - though a little elaboration wouldn't go amiss, since Morris's works emerge from his own experience and preoccupations and individual pieces can have specific narrative contexts. The smaller set of works make up a terrific quartet under the collective title Dooagh Springtime Garden. They are thoroughly effective en masse and make up an outstanding sculptural visualisation of the theme. Morris ingeniously conveys the annual magic of plants springing from the winter earth and taking shape incredibly quickly. There is a palpable sense of buds poking up through the earth, of their burgeoning growth and of the striking, ingenious anatomy of plants. It is rare to find a sculptor using bronze ambitiously in this way.

In some of the work in his exhibition Liberation at the Origin Gallery, Gavin Hogg works scrawled graffiti into his trademark, boldly coloured grids. His square, often symmetrically patterned paintings suggest associations with crosswords and board games, circuit boards and even mandalas. His use of wax as a medium for oil paint recalls the sensual relish of Jasper John's famous flag and target paintings.

The basic idea is that an overtly textural, painterly quality is played against the regularity of the geometric pattern. Johns, a wonderful painter and a smart one too, inexplicably came to grief later in his career when he became bogged down in a series of heavy-handed, over-intellectualised works. Hogg isn't Johns, but his attempted development of a basic pictorial strategy is not entirely convincing either. His bid to accommodate gestural spontaneity in the framework he has established is inconclusive. Not quite liberation, then, but he remains an interesting painter.