Dead Texan art doesn't take sides

Iontas, the annual open submission small works exhibition, began in 1990. As with all such shows, it has had its ups and downs, but overall it has grown in popularity among both artists and audiences.

There is something appealing about the idea of working to a brief, within given constraints, and artists have responded well to the challenge, often regarding the requirement to work to a small scale as a prompt for lively negotiation.

This year, though, Iontas has been undergoing a review and will be revamped in time for its 2003 incarnation, so instead of an open submission show we are offered current works by the award-winners from its first six years. Which turns out to be no bad thing. It is inevitably a mixed bag, but there are many familiar names there and some nice surprises from less familiar names so that, in all, there is a body of really strong work at the heart of the show.

Mark Joyce was making paintings when he won in 1993, but the photographs he exhibits here under the title The Idea of North are among the best things on view.

Mary McIntyre, who won an award early in 1991, has become one of the leading photographic artists in the country. There are some beautiful stone carvings by Eileen MacDonagh. Others who acquit themselves particularly well are Sioban Piercy, Remco de Fouw, Aidan Linehan, Grainne Dowling, Cliona Harmey, Niall Naessens, Paul O'Reilly, Gwen O'Dowd, Tom Fitzgerald, Ann Mulrooney, Blaise Drummond . . . in fact the list could go on. More than long enough to make one hope that in the course of its review, Iontas doesn't throw out the baby with the bath water.

Tom Molloy specialises in labour-intensive, logistically daunting projects with a strong conceptual emphasis. A conventionally gifted draughtsman, his natural skills are placed at the service of programmes of work involving extreme levels of repetition and uniformity. This time around, it is Dead Texans at the Rubicon Gallery. He has made tiny, meticulous pencil portraits of 100 people who have been executed in the state of Texas in recent years. Texas is strong on the death penalty, and the head-and-shoulders images come from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Molloy is not making any obvious political or moral point in presenting these portraits. We might conclude that he is against the death penalty, but there is no overt argument in that respect. Perhaps some of the individuals he depicts have been the victims of miscarriages of justice, but we have no way of knowing because all we see in each case is a face.

Suppose he had, for the sake of argument, depicted 100 people who had been murdered in Texas in recent years, would that have implied that he is tacitly in favour of the death penalty? Presumably he did not want to get into that particular area.

What we have is a group of images that represent a considerable investment of the artist's time and skill. We know they are all human beings executed by officers of the state but nothing else about them, so we are invited to contemplate the idea and the fact of the large-scale execution of its citizens by a state. Beyond that, we are left to our own thoughts.

The other component in the show, a series of 10 identical Self-Portraits, comprises pencil drawings from a frontal X-ray photograph of the artist's own head. The obsessive reiteration of the painstakingly drawn image suggests a kind of helplessness in the face of, or perhaps a helpless fascination with, the idea of mortality. By projecting an image of the body as an empty container, Molloy might be said to point us towards the inevitable emptiness of death at the heart of life.

Repetition looms large in Roisin Lewis's work in Palimpsest at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery as well. In two series of drawings, of the tongue and the hands, respectively, she mimics communicative activity, speech and gesture. She doesn't, in any obvious way at least, devise a specific symbolic code. Instead, in building up her images in orderly, rhythmic layers - with a rather nice, fluent line - we get the idea of continual, habitual response, a langauge instinct, perhaps. There is a level of resemblance to the calligraphic drawings and paintings of Mark Tobey and others. It is agreeable, look-again work, and it will be interesting to see where she takes it from here.

In the past, Michael Fitzharris's work has shown him to be steeped in the mid-20th century Irish tradition of lyrical landscape painting exemplified by Patrick Collins, Tony O'Malley and Camille Souter. His sensitive appreciation of that tradition however, was perhaps detrimental to his efforts to find his own voice. With his current show at the Ashford Gallery he seems to have broken the spell.

There are some signs of a conscious, willed loosening up, particularly in some smaller pieces, but also a general tendency towards teasing out a more personal language. His paintings are still recognisably related to that tradition, but in a more fruitful and satisfactory way. As with Collins, his concern is to open up a space in the painting, to a resonant, generative space in which things happen, which we can occupy imaginatively. There are many landscape references, home and abroad, to what does happen, and a playful quality reminiscent of Miró and even Felim Egan.

Reviewed:

Iontas 2002, Sligo Art Gallery (071-45847) until July 27th

Tom Molloy, Dead Texans, Rubicon Gallery (01- 6708055) until August 3rd

Roisin Lewis, Palimpsest, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (01-8740064) until July 27th

Michael Fitzharris, Recent works, Ashford Gallery (01-6617286) until July 25th