Art served up with an extra helping of Mayo

Reviewed:

Hardlands by Martin Gale, Taylor Galleries, Dublin, until June 23rd (01-6766055)

Group Six, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until June 23rd (01-6708055)

In Martin Gale's paintings at the Taylor Galleries, the human presence is ubiquitous in the landscape but dwarfed and dominated by it. The Hardlands of the show's title are the vast expanses of blanket bog of north Mayo, a landscape of mountain and moor, headland and water, hammered into submission by relentless wind and rain.

It is beautiful, but in a tougher, bleaker, less human way than are Connemara or west Cork. Even the great naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger, well used to solitude, confessed to being a little daunted at the extent of Mayo's nothingness, describing the drive along the bog road from Bangor to Crossmolina as almost frightening in its isolation.

Gale went to Mayo to stay at Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle on the coast, and the work he produced must count as one of the most considered and substantial artistic responses to the local environment by one of Ballinglen's many visitors.

The physical conditions of that environment, he notes in the catalogue, "make the business of living there a full-time job".

And his view is implicitly that of people who live and work in the landscape rather than with those who look at it in purely aesthetic or recreational terms.

It is not that he is setting out to deconstruct the mythologised west of Ireland, as some artists do, so much as trying to take the place on its own terms.

Its own terms are largely, in an unsentimental way, nature's terms. Nature, that is, not as the cultural construct that post-modern theory would make of it, but nature as weather, as geological process, as something in your face, something you have to cope with, to try to live with.

Time and again in the paintings, people and their trappings are literally pushed to the edge or rendered insignificant by the scale of what is around them.

In Meeting, at first glance you could easily miss the group standing outside the starkly presented house with its rain-washed, plain rendered gables. There is not much energy or inclination left over for ornament here.

Just maintaining a presence in this huge, indifferent terrain is problematic. The water welling up in Wetland seems on the verge of engulfing the boggy ground. Every token of human order, including walls bordering roads, houses and fields, is hard won.

A scattering of drainage pipes lies along the bed of a flooded channel that cuts through a wet field. People are often pictured standing quietly, reflectively, staring off into space.

The Weather In Mayo could be taken as a reworking of one of Casper David Friedrich's archetypal Romantic landscapes. But here, rather than a wanderer ecstatically glimpsing the mind of God in the sublime, we have a stoic farmer at the edge of a boggy field in the slating rain with a bulldozer sitting idly in the heavy mud.

There is, oddly enough, a real if melancholy beauty here. One can love the pull of the sodden land, the bold accents of winter vegetation. There is also a distinct sense, though, of the way the grinding force of a wet Irish winter can suck the energy and the will from you.

Gale's characteristic technique is to create a hard, meticulously rendered surface in which detail is crisply articulated, as though viewed in the aftermath of a recent heavy shower.

The result is that the visible world comes across with a sort of hyper-real, bruising clarity. (Although, in recent years this trademark style has been complemented by a softer, more impressionistic treatment of landscape on a small scale.)

One of the strengths of Gale's work is that while, in a sense, it is straightforward pictorial reportage, like the best reportage it also functions on several other levels, repaying different strands of analysis. Hardlands is a fine exhibition.

There is some terrifically inventive painting in the Rubicon Gallery's Group Six, featuring half a dozen young artists, most of them recent graduates. They include Bart O'Reilly, who plays around with images snatched from television and film, so processing them that they are unrecognisable but remarkably engaging.

In a vaguely similar way, though with results that differ significantly in appearance, Robbie O'Halloran incorporates given motifs in pared-down abstract compositional schemes. His paintings are like propositions that invite our response.

Tadhg McSweeney's beautifully textured, subtly coloured works have a nicely casual air, picking up motifs in an unforced way. Restrained and confidently understated, they are richly atmospheric.

Although her contribution consists of individual pieces, Laura Buckley makes what is in essence a site-specific installation with a series of shaped pieces. While it doesn't quite come to life - it could be that it has very specific lighting requirements - it is potentially very promising.

Alice Peillon collects and reprocesses motifs in methodical, overtly systematic but somehow arbitrary schemes. Colin Rush exhaustively details an electronically processed image, fore-grounding the process.

While these artists do not make up a group as such, their work in its considerable variety has in common a coolness, almost a scepticism. It is guarded, clear-headed and generally modest in scope and aims. None of which prevents it from producing interesting and promising results.