Experiments with the science world

Visual Arts: There is something slightly eerie about the Kerlin's current Mark Francis exhibition, pendulum, but then there is always something a bit unsettling about his work, writes Aidan Dunne.

He established his reputation with stark, monochromatic paintings evoking microscopic organic forms and processes. The slick, flat images had a blurred, processed look about them, as though they were enlargements of microphotographs. Yet they never aspired to innocence in a National Geographic, wonder-of-nature way. Against a background of AIDS, MRSA and other superbugs, CJD and avian flu, these arrays of sperm, bacilli and other microorganisms, viewed as if on slides in the lab, were distinctly ominous.

A further, metaphoric reach was provided by grid-like frameworks, suggestive of structured networks and systems. His new paintings, in which smeared ink-black lines and blot-like ellipses stand out against monochromatic grounds, from livid red to simple white, are in essence lacy, wavering grids. It is as if the dark ellipses suck in energy; they are like black holes. The paintings, overall, evoke the state of systems, functioning but precarious. The cited source is the schematic record of sound waves. But, as with his views of microorganisms, Francis imbues them with wider, more troubled layers of potential meaning. As ever, they are extremely well made and visually compelling.

As it happens, imagery related to scientific research is a significant component in several shows in Dublin at the moment, while Clodagh Emoe (at Temple Bar), which will be reviewed at a later date, actually takes as her subject our attempts to comprehend the physical world. Patrick Michael Fitzgerald and Ronnie Hughes's Synecdoche at the Rubicon is not a collaboration but their work is complementary. In the past Hughes has developed elegant abstract paintings drawing on various scientific models of reality. Yet one felt it was often the quirkiness of these models that particularly appealed to him, the way physicists related their families of exotic particles to a more familiar world.

Laterally he has merged theory even more intricately with this immediate world of personal experience, memory and anecdote. There is an persuasive, languid charm to his drawings and paintings. In both, loops describe the tracks of atomistic coloured dots. He likes a pale, subdued palette and works in semitransparent layers. Perhaps it's appropriate to describe work that derives in some measure from speculative entities called charmed quarks as itself charming.

If less avowedly, Fitzgerald's work also recalls models of the physical world, from the subatomic to the galactic. There is an terrifically playful quality to the way he treats the compositional plane as an imaginative springboard. He creates a "false" plane with layers of lacquer, and he physically punctures the plane as though with a circular projectile. The result is an extraordinary dynamism as the domain of the painting - or drawing - opens out in every direction.

Eoin O'Connor, in The Sun through a Telescope, works in a familiar contemporary vein of laid-back, oblique, eclectic representation. There is a whimsical, spare quality to his method, not unakin to the animation technique of South Park or the sort of graphic design associated with techno music. His paintings have the air of being schematic illustrations, setting out to explain something, but what? The invisible element of contemporary communication technologies is, we are informed, one possible answer.

The titles allude to various technological and scientific subjects and objects, from prisms to monitoring apparatus, wind tunnels to weather balloons. In fact the latter is recognisably there in the painting - not a standard occurrence throughout the exhibition as a whole. It is as if O'Connor is trying to feel his way toward a visual language capable of dealing incisively with the contemporary cultural landscape. His work is tentative but ambitious.

Katherina Wulff's paintings are "full of mystery and humour" we are told, but "devoid of irony". Mmm, hard to be sure of that. While she can come across as a relatively sophisticated painter, often she drifts so far into faux naif or amateur territory that it's very hard to believe that her tongue is not lodged firmly in her cheek. Das Verbrechen is a veritable catalogue of what would in conventional terms be described as typical errors and failings of amateur painters. Yet parts of it are more knowing, as if Wulff is self-consciously referencing amateur technique.

Certainly she continually underlines her own eclecticism, and it is also true that her entire approach depends on a perpetual flirtation with pictorial naivety. She paints as if in a dreamy haze. Elements of dream, vision and fantasy overlap in her pictures. One of the best, Waldpaziergang, is a positively sinister work in which children are hollow puppets manipulated by adults. Elsewhere the mood is lighter, though similar thematic and narrative puzzles are set. Perhaps the pictures are, more than anything, puzzles, like dreams that both invite and thwart interpretation.

In Gallery 2, Seydou Keita's photographic portraits are brilliant. They were taken in the capital of Mali in the 1940s and 1950s, a period "marking the birth of modernity in West Africa". One wonders what became of the women and children who are their subjects. Keita adopts a form of casual formality that is perfectly judged, and in keeping with the care with which the sitters present themselves. A level of artifice is evident and acknowledged, but there is room for the images to become whatever they might be. That is, he is not aspiring to a particular idealised portrait form, more showing that he is aware of it, then improvising around it and injecting it with tremendous vitality. He also has a strong sculptural sense.

Reviewed

pendulum, Mark Francis, Kerlin Gallery until Mar 25 (01-6709093); Synecdoche, Patrick Michael Fitzgerald and Ronnie Hughes, Rubicon Gallery until Apr 1 (01-6708055); The Sun Though a Telescope, Ashford Gallery until Mar 23 (01-6617286); Katherina Wulff, Paintings, Douglas Hyde Gallery 1 until Apr 11 (01-6081116) Seydou Keita, Photographic portraits, Douglas Hyde Gallery 2 until Apr 11