Visual Arts/ Aidan Dunne:All of David Quinn's new paintings at Kevin Kavanagh are circular in format. They are telescopic views that focus on carefully articulated details. These include a tower, a mountain and a human figure, captured in several contemplative moments.
Form is simplified in the images, their surfaces are slow and deliberate, and everything has a sculptural blockiness, though not necessarily a sculptural mass: much of the brushwork describes light and air, with a preference for the atmospheric colouring of dawn or evening.
Quinn's work habitually evokes a cherished world that comes across as being slightly apart from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. It's a quieter, pastoral place. Recurrent views of walls, gates, openings, boundaries and distant prospects underline the separation of this realm from an Outside that is potentially hostile and distrusted. In other words, individually and collectively, the paintings are allegories of the way we make personal worlds around ourselves, worlds within worlds.
A translation of a poem, There Has to be More, by film director Andrei Tarkovsky's father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, accompanies the show. More than once in his work, Tarkovsky senior outlines visions of idyllic harmony that are shadowed by a lurking unease, most graphically in his poem First Meetings, when an account of the magic of blissful love concludes abruptly with the lines: "When fate was following in our tracks/ Like a madman with a razor in his hand."
The sentiments of There Has to be More and First Meetings sum up the issues that have a bearing on personal versus wider worlds in Quinn's paintings. The personal is never immune from the workings of the outside world, whether arbitrary or inevitable, but on the other hand, something is lost if our attempts to curtail the arbitrary and the outside in general are too extreme. To be hermetically sealed off is to forsake nurture as well as risk. It's a theme of long-term interest to the writer Thomas Pynchon, one of whose early stories, Entropy, deals memorably, and almost schematically, with it.
If in the past Quinn's paintings implied that a preference for a contained personal world was a foregone conclusion, his new work sees him take a much more ambivalent stance. His pictures often tread a fine line between sensitivity and sentimentality, usually successfully. They do so here as well, yet there are problems with the presentation. Surely the less there is between the edges of each circle and the viewer the better, but as it happens the paintings are encased in big, glazed, porthole-like frames that somehow diminish them and at the same time make the whole painting-and-frame ensemble appear unwieldy. That's a pity.
IN GENIUS LOCI, which closed yesterday at Monster Truck Gallery, Louise Ward and Amy Walsh offered complementary ways of exploring "a sense of place". Walsh showed extremely accomplished video pieces with related photographs, and Ward showed paintings made with boldness and sensitivity.
The video, Maximum 12 per Person, is an excerpt from the life of the Magnolia Bakery in Manhattan, where local residents and visitors queue to buy the bakery's celebrated cupcakes. There's something nice about the exaltation of these modest confections, which is surely as much about a social ritual as any intrinsic merit in the cakes, delicious as they might be. An episode of Seinfeld featured a comparable Manhattan phenomenon.
While Walsh highlights the communal in this piece, with Apartment Window she looks at another aspect of big-city life, with a nod to Hitchcock. Three video monitors present us, voyeuristically, with views into the illuminated spaces of three apartments as their occupants go about the routine business of living. Curiosity keeps you watching, and the experience echoes the sense of distance, separation and anonymity of urban living.
Ward's paintings are built up in thin, often translucent layers. Despite the multiple layers, they are gestural and free, because she manages to maintain a spontaneity and delicacy from start to finish. Each focuses on a place that has personal significance for her in some way or another.
Offering recalls a temple interior and mingles memories of a real place with its incarnation in dreams. Curtain is a recollection of a corner of a room, and while the title is presumably factual - we can see the curtain in question - the painting is nicely structured so that it revolves around an empty space, and the title also alludes to something concluding, to the curtain coming down.
Until December 24th, Naas's Skyline Gallery is installed in Cow's Lane in Temple Bar, where an extensive show of landscape photographs by Eoghan Kavanagh is on view. An accompanying statement notes that he uses a specially made Ebony Field Camera with 5in x 4in plate film, allowing an amazing level of detail even on large-scale prints. There is no digital or other manipulation at any stage of the process.
Aesthetically, Kavanagh is inclined to opt for conventionally scenic views, conventionally presented, but apart altogether from his great technical skill, he is also formally adventurous on occasion, and many individual pieces are outstanding, including some daringly minimal views. His most recent series of works is also very good, juxtaposing close details of horses grazing along the shore at Ballyconneely with the expanses of sky and the Atlantic. It's well worth a walk to Cow's Lane.
If you attend exhibitions regularly you hardly need to be told that William Crozier is a fine painter whose arrangements of line, pattern and colour are brilliantly inventive variations on a theme.
He is on top form in his current Taylor Gallery show, which features a particularly good complement of small-scale works on paper. It's long been evident that he is also a terrific printmaker, and two carborundum prints, both with Italian gardens as their subject, are so good they almost steal the show.
The exhibition coincides with the publication of a major monograph on Crozier, published by Lund Humphries, edited by Katherine Crouan, and lavishly illustrated. It's available at the gallery as well as from booksellers.
• David Quinn: New Paintings is at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, 66 Great Strand Street, Dublin 1, until Jan 5 (closed Dec 23-Jan 3); Eoghan Kavanagh's landscape photographs are at the Skyline Gallery, Cow's Lane, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, until Dec 24; William Crozier: Paintings and Works on Paper is at the Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare Street, Dublin 2, until Dec 20
