Genuine, original and imaginative

GENE LAMBERT appears to have an affinity with poets, or perhaps it is the reverse and it is they who are drawn to his work; or perhaps, again, it is basically a bit of both. Some years ago he had a virtual collaboration with Paul Durcan in the now vanished Hendriks Gallery, and in the RHA Gallagher Gallery he shows paintings which are backed by poems by Brian Lynch. A slim book or booklet accompanies the exhibition, in which pictures and poems look across at each other from fronting pages; it is called Playtime.

The poems themselves read well and wittily, but my brief here is the paintings. Briefly, they are mostly about war, and about men playing at war - sometimes on the toy soldier level, sometimes in deadly (sic) earnest.

Toy cavalrymen charge, toy Highlanders tramp forward with ceremonial swords at the ready, casualties are carried to ambulances etc. The British Raj, almost inevitably, is much in evidence, since it is - or was until recently - part of the folk memory of the Dublin working class.

War apart, there are a number of pictures which avoid martial imagery; some feature wooden toys or children's games, and there is one quite beautiful picture called The Bee-orchid, which is virtually a still life though of a strange, quasi surreal, dreamlike genre.

The pictures, all relatively small, are on wood, and the colours are muted and almost dusty, dominated by warm tones but with a curious hazy, unfocused quality, as though we were watching some dream ritual or looking through a haze of past time.

Lambert is not an easy artist to figure; after an immensely promising start as a painter, he turned for a time to photography, and more recently he has taken up a form of still life painting. It is a career which moves by jumps and sharp, oblique turns rather than in a straight line, but it is not any less interesting for that; and, while a few of these paintings do seem not quite "realised", all of them have a genuine individuality and come from an original sensibility and imagination. Though this is not a large exhibition, it does create a world - a mini world, you might say - entirely its own.