Images of the inner and outer worlds

The opening of this large exhibition was graced by an eloquent speech from Seamus Heaney, who even read some poems special to the occasion. The bulk of the work on view has, in fact, been seen before in Sligo and Limerick, but that was some time ago and some new paintings have been added since. It is virtually two exhibitions, mounted side by side but not intermixed; the Good Friday paintings which O'Malley has produced over many years, and a number of recent pictures, some rather uncharacteristically large in size.

Since they are hung in adjacent rooms they divide almost into contrasting light and dark, winter and summer - or more accurately, perhaps, into the inner and outer worlds. A simplistic description, no doubt, but there is certainly an inward, brooding O'Malley and an outward-looking, joyful one. And, in his old age, the latter has tended to dominate, especially in his many paintings based on the small pond in his garden in Callan.

In some ways these late pictures are a reversion to his Bahamian canvases - loose, impressionistic and dominated by light. But there are notable exceptions: the beautiful Green Linnet, for example, or the almost hermetic Kyleadoher, a genuine masterpiece of abstract nature symbolism. In O'Malley, the pantheist and the Christian appear to inhabit the one skin - which, after all, is a very Irish phenomenon, as the old Gaelic nature poetry shows.

The religious works (surely one is justified in calling them that?) are, of course, very disparate and range over several decades. O'Malley's habit of painting a Good Friday picture is not a matter of orthodoxy, but the expression of an essentially religious spirit to whom traditional Christian imagery is both a natural language and an indispensable, inherited network of symbols. The Cross, the symbols of the Passion in general, the Underworld and the Resurrection are linked in his work (as, of course, they were in their origins) to their equivalents in the natural world, and to the cycle of death and renewal.

Some of his most original and haunting paintings have been born from this dualism - which is as much as to say some of the finest Irish pictures of the past half-century at least. His subtlety in using dark or low tones which produce muted, shadowy and sometimes tragic effects, his stark but subtle sense of imagery and the psycho-poetic intensity of his imagination are distilled here to their barest essence. One wonders what a society like ours, still in reaction against the recent past and the misuse of institutionalised religion, will make of it.

Until September 28th.