THREE of the Taylor Galleries' regulars - Mary Lohan, Charles Tyrrell and James O'Connor - are grouped together for an exhibition in Paris, where the deluge of Irish culture is by now almost in flow, and in return three French painters exhibit at the Taylor in Dublin. Painters, note, not conceptualists nor performance artists; it seems that Paris still has a number of them, though they do not send ripples around the world as they once did.
On the ground floor, Yo (that is her name, in short there is no longer version) is muted and suggestive in style, with figures and faces looming - out vaguely from a yellow gold background or surround as they might out of old, half obliterated family portraits or Old Masters in need of restoration. Here and there I seemed also to detect the legacy of Giacometti, in the very frontal stances of the figures and the suggestion of motion held in suspense.
Werner Buckler, on the floor above, paints quasi abstracts with landscape undertones and sofi "organic" shapes occasionally emerging in a floating, indeterminate way. The colour is soft and attractive, almost pastel like, sometimes merging into a romantic vagueness. What is lacking is a genuinely individual vision; one has the feeling of having seen it before, or something very like it.
Jean Dometti, on the top floor, is in some ways the most individual of the three. Like Yo, he paints in rather muted, dusty colours, and with a sense of partly veiled depths under them; the imagery is not strikingly original, but there is a pervading painterliness and good taste in the positive, not the negative sense. He disposes of his limited range of formal ideas with elegance and a hint of mystery, using a cruciform shape effectively, and he applies his paint with a delicate and knowing hand.
