Art falls short of agenda described in slogans

Reviewed:

Falling into People's Mouths, Anne Seagrave, Temple Bar Gallery, until December 30th (performance interaction 5 p.m. daily)

Woodcut Prints, James O'Nolan, Green on Red Gallery until December 23rd

Jay Roche, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

I art, Paul Regan, Space 28, North Lotts, until January 31st

Donald Teskey, Rubicon Gallery, until December 18th

Anne Seagrave's ambitious performance installation piece at Temple Bar, Falling Into People's Mouths, has a specific rationale indicated in its various accompanying slogans which include: "A collision between property and person", "Dissolving in a world of things", and "The property of imagination". What she seems to have in mind is a dramatisation of the "rival values placed on property and person" in law and, perhaps, a critical view of the process of commodification, particularly in the cultural sphere. She sets about this by enacting certain imaginative qualities indicated by terms like intangible, ethereal, mercurial, fleeting. All of which cumulatively suggest the incalculable, life-enhancing human element.

As a conceptual framework, this sounds quite abstract and slippery in outline, and so it proves. However, while it's not quite clear that she fulfils her agenda, the installation itself is superbly done on several levels, including design, performance and technical detail. The gallery space is broken up and plunged into a beautiful blue semi-darkness by means of a filtering screen. The most impressive single facet of the multi-part show is Lightly, a video projection in which the dancing, blackclad figure of the artist flickers in and out of the frame, now defying gravity, now seeming partially present, now darting crabwise across the floor.

James O'Nolan's Woodcut Prints at Green on Red are, paradoxically, almost aggressively gestural but also understated. He has scored the surfaces of sheets of plywood and chipboard - not your usual woodcut material - with numerous slashing strokes, leaving dense, jagged overall patterns. But the sheer proliferation of strokes produces a calm, overall pattern, and the blacks and greys used in the printing help to create a soft, subdued feeling. With compositions consisting of simple subdivisions, like vertical bands or a cruciform motif, the overall effect is close to minimal. In their making, woodcuts are an exercise in subtraction, and it is as if Nolan has carried the principle through from technique to aesthetic in these works. At every stage, you feel, he actively resists over-elaboration. The result is an impressively cool, spare, uncluttered show.

Jay Roche's paintings, at Kevin Kavanagh, are accurately pitched at the level of the debate about where painting is at right now. Behind their apparent simplicity is an astute grasp of what options are available to the painter at a precise historical moment. This, even allied to evident skill, is not necessarily a recipe for outstanding art, though in a few cases Roche does hit the mark - generally, it seems to me, in his simplest pieces.

His house-painter's palette, and his use of enamel, plus the cool deliberation of his method, suggests the influence of Gary Hume. But Hume is mentioned just as a reference point, not to suggest to any direct stylistic similarity. Roche's compositions, with their narrow streams of paint guided around the canvas, or with contrasting dots dropped onto wet blobs, have a deadpan, mischevous quality not a million miles removed from Joan Miro. If, in many of the works, he's not quite there this time, you certainly leave the show feeling curious about what he's going to do next.

Hume inevitably comes to mind in relation to Paul Regan's I art at Space 28 as well, not just because he uses enamel and emulsion paint, but also for the coolness of his stance and his use of impassive expanses of flat colour. Like Roche, he allows flurries of impulsive mark-making to intrude onto these expanses, and again whatever gestural play is permitted is anything but expressive. Taking the paintings together with a group of inkjet prints, it becomes clear that Regan's work responds to the complexity of the contemporary visual environment with its plethora of imagery, signs and codes.

He shows a willingness to push things out a little further, to go for jagged combinations of conflicting and overlapping languages, generating a slightly demented but consistently interesting visual energy.

The choppy, agitated surfaces of Donald Teskey's paintings convey the drama of his urban landscapes. Nature rules even in the city streets. In stormy light and windy weather figures scuttle by. There is an emphatic physicality to his paintwork, in the way pictures are formed from a thick, heavy skin of pigment. Yet the images are oblique and casual, scenes glimpsed from the corner of the eye, a hallmark of his pictorial style from the beginning.

Overall the paintings are spirited and engaging. The curiously squared-off forms that are perhaps unduly dominant in several compositions are explained by a reference in the catalogue text to his use of a plasterer's trowel to apply pigment. Artists quite rightly use any and everything that suits them to apply paint, but if the effect of the tool amounts to a stylistic mannerism, the effect can be seductive but superficial, and there is at least the risk of that happening here.