WET PAINT 1 is the first instalment of a two-part show of younger painters at the Rubicon.
Five artists show this time around, with five more to come in mid-July. The most striking link between the work on show here is that almost all of it operates on a small scale, as though its creators were running scared from any charges of bombast.
Sarah Durcan's oils are ghostly fragments, delivered in a style that seems to evoke the soft images of primitive photography, or perhaps x-rays. This is apt enough, as they often feature skeletal fragments of antique ornaments, treated in a chilly and other-worldly manner that sets figuration against fading abrabesques.
Aoife Harrington's precious, muted pictures show the artist locked in a fascination with microcosmic differences, tiny nuances of paint which conceal themselves about her basically monochrome surfaces.
Maureen O'Connor's untitled acrylic-on-calico works are certainly the most frenetic on show, but their vigorous colours and lines do not quite compensate for a certain conceptual thinness.
At first glance, Alexis Harding's little canvases might depict cake designs, but closer inspection shows a mesh of minute, grotesque ridges and pits. The effect is to give a nasty, corporeal feel to the work, something which is further emphasised by Harding's habit of leaving his paintings to dry irregularly, allowing the pigment to creep into fleshy raggedness.
Blaise Drummond's small canvases are hung together in a grid, which gives them, superficially at least, a little more monumentality than the other works on show. The individual paintings, however, seems to aim for - and achieve - disposability. Cynically rough, preliminary images of tiny cattle, or wallpaper flowers, or grapes, they make a strange addition to a show, for they seem to suggest an artist convinced of the weariness of his medium.
