Mapping the boundaries

Visual Arts: Alison Pilkington's exhibition at the Workroom in the Hendron Building, a new gallery on Upper Dominick Street, is something of a departure for her, in that it includes three video pieces.

Reviewed - Alison Pilkington, the Workroom at the Hendron Building, Dublin, until Saturday (01-8303211)
John Shinnors: Twenty Two Paintings, Taylor Galleries, Dublin, until Saturday (01-6766055)

She is known as an accomplished painter, and paintings make up the central strand of the show. An accompanying note says that the work is drawn from her experiences of living in both Ireland and rural Spain. So ideas relating to urban versus rural, "alone-ness" and cultural apartness are in play.

They are most obviously in play in the three videos. The most ambitious and considered of the three is What Remains, a meditation on, to use Simon Schama's phrase, landscape and memory. Pilkington draws together footage of an archetypally beautiful Irish landscape, around Ben Bulben and Glencar, in Co Sligo. But the calm aesthetic of what we see is undermined by an overlying narrative in the form of a report by a republican volunteer about the killing of a number of antitreaty comrades by Free State forces during the Civil War. The cruelty, even savagery, alluded to in the laconic report is part and parcel of the outwardly placid landscape.

It's a straightforward though resonant piece that makes its points well and is a fine collaborative effort on the part of Pilkington and others. The other videos are, relatively speaking, more like sketchbook drawings than finished paintings. One is a leisurely account of a fiesta in, presumably, a rural Spanish town, though the location is never specified. Pointedly so, because it seems to be about being an outsider, an observer. It captures that distinctive sense of witnessing someone else's social rituals.

The third piece shares the effect of placement, that is of situating not only the artist but also the spectator, with a view to Pascal's fear of "the silence of those infinite spaces" among the stars. And so we come to the paintings. They are bold but restrained compositions in which space and placement are again the dominant ideas. And again Pilkington sets about placing us in relation to varying kinds and scales of place, from urban to galactic.

What is most striking is perhaps the lack of sentimentality, a tone comparable to the choice of the cool, unemotional language of the volunteer's report in What Remains. Pilkington evokes spaces that have a beautiful, seductive quality, that seem to promise much, but, she implies, our sense of ownership or belonging is illusory: despite its apparent familiarity the world is not actually for us. Several paintings focus on the tension of edges, mapping the boundaries between different domains, not just physically but also psychically, as with the history of violence hidden within the calm composure of the landscape in the video.

The broad swathes and washes of pigment that make up the paintings are appropriate in that they too have an air of impersonality, as though the artist steps back and lets them happen. Yet they are very well and sensitively made, with great feeling for surface, colour and scale; the larger works inhabit their scale perfectly, something rare enough in Irish painting. For Pilkington the show is not only a departure but also a promising and intriguing one.

John Shinnors is in the remarkable position of having attained cult status in the context of Irish art. Doubtless a number of factors contributed to such a phenomenon, among them the distinctiveness of his signature style. As with the work of the late Charles Brady, a Shinnors painting is instantly recognisable. But that's not enough in itself. Not only is his style unmistakable, it is also visually and intellectually engaging.

He engages by using a consistent repertoire of motifs with a striking sense of design. To some extent his paintings can be decoded by the informed observer. Certain things recur. Badgers, cows, swallows, washing hung on a line, lighthouses and scarecrows all feature on the mental checklists of seasoned Shinnors watchers.

He takes from these varied things, animate and inanimate, a common quality of strong abstract patterning. He is fascinated by moments when we are visually disoriented, when we suddenly doubt our reading of the world. Such moments - unexpected flutters of movement, seeing one thing where we expect to see another, seeing something entirely out of place - occur all the time, but we learn to block and ignore them; otherwise everyday perception would be impossible. Occasionally, the strangeness of reality breaks through the barriers of schooled perception and rationality.

The scarecrow occupies a special place in Shinnors's world. As Peter Fallon points out in his introduction to the catalogue, the scarecrow is itself a representation of the human, a straw man, and it allows Shinnors to treat the human indirectly, as he treats the world in general, at a level of abstraction.

The artist has explained the genesis of his interest in scarecrows, which has a distinctly strange and macabre element, and these aspects often come through in his paintings, which have a strong feeling of the mask and what might lie beyond it.

All the habitual motifs are evident in the current show, but it would be unfair to imply that it is just business as usual. In fact there is a feeling that Shinnors is fairly relaxed in this body of work, which is good rather than bad. Most of the paintings are characterised by movement and energy, fleeting but strong, particularly the sequences of Birds Over Loop - that's Loop Head, in west Co Clare, a familiar sight.

The smaller versions of this theme graduate to a notably large, ambitious composition that suggests the painter is well able for the scale. The composition works because he doesn't feel the need to overelaborate. He restricts himself to the same limited palette, the same formal language as the smaller pieces, and the result is impressive and innovative within his oeuvre.

Fans won't need encouragement, but if you are not yet acquainted with his work, go along and see what all the fuss is about.