Familiar victories

OUR VICTORY

Kevin Kavanagh, Chancery Lane, Dublin Mon-Fri 10.30am-5.30pm, Sat 11am-5pm Until June 20 01-4759514

There’s usually something odd and unsettling about Stephen Loughman’s paintings. They have a photographic quality, and often feature settings that have the appearance of being dramatic backdrops, but without the dramatis personae. Their emptiness adds to their eeriness, although they are not always empty. Latterly Loughman has derived his subjects from feature films, presenting us with locations that have a half-familiar, half-strange quality.

Familiar because we’ve registered them on a subliminal level, and strange because we’re seeing them out of context, rendered in Loughman’s neutral, offhand style.

For this current show, he has drawn chiefly on fiction films set during the second World War, a conflict that has inspired a vast amount of attention from fiction writers and filmmakers.