Pleasure in the small things

Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: Painter John Kingerlee, who was born in Birmingham in 1936, has been associated with and based on the Beara Peninsula since the beginning of the 1980s. His paintings in From Beara to Fez are small, sometimes very small, and, for the most part, encrusted with layers of dense pigment, giving their surfaces a textural unevenness.

Colour is fed into the process and on occasion is vividly present, but more often a picture will progress toward a dominant, almost iridescent whiteness - perhaps the brilliant light of North Africa provides the impetus. This endows the subject matter - landscape, simple abstract grids and human figure - with a sunny lyricism. There is a rhythmic sense of time passing, of cyclical events, and of celebration of ordinary things.

Several of the paintings with all-over patterning resemble miniaturised Jackson Pollock drip paintings, albeit in a much sweeter, more domesticated vein. Several other exemplars, closer to home, come to mind as well, including Patrick Collins, Camille Souter, Gerald Davis and Jack B Yeats. This is because, even though he is a late, elective resident in Ireland, Kingerlee's paintings sit comfortably within the tradition of Souter and Collins, of, in other words, quite a specific mid-20th century strain of Irish painting.

While his work is uneven - he seems abidingly uneasy with figurative subjects, for example, can be very heavy-handed with line and colour, and has a tendency to sentimentalise things - at his best he comes across as a capable, if minor, lyrical painter. There is currently a concerted effort to represent him as something considerably more than that, to effectively mythologise him in the mould of an archetypal Romantic figure. This show coincides with the publication of a large illustrated monograph on him. The book comes not from an established art publishing house per se: it is published by "Larry Powell Management". It doesn't substantiate a claim that Kingerlee should be regarded as a major artistic figure or as being in any sense "revolutionary". Rather, his work sits comfortably within the bounds of long-accepted convention: not that there's anything wrong with that, but it doesn't quite accord with the hype.

Claire Carpenter's tempera-on-gesso paintings in her Ashford Gallery show, The Sudden Randomness of the Present, are fantasies shot through with dark undercurrents. Carpenter conjures up an indeterminate, dream-like space and seeds it with fluent narrative fragments. While these are to some extent accessible, in that we can recognise imagery and absorb atmosphere, they are ambiguous in that we never learn quite enough to pin down what exactly is going on.

But taken en masse, there is what might be described as a consistent narrative mood and the intricately rendered depictions of animals (often linked to childhood), human figures, and landscape details, come across as being grounded in murky tales of innocence and guilt, love and loss, power and desire. There is a recurrent emphasis on the act of looking. Apart from effective passages of slow, moody paintwork, the work is dominated by delicate, very fine brush drawings, in relation to which the gesso support is ideally suited to pick up every trembling mark. Like much contemporary work in this vein, the paintings are small in scale, though on the evidence of the bigger pieces, Carpenter is well able to work larger. It is a thoughtful, quietly engrossing show.

Sonja Landweer's exhibition at the Peppercanister Gallery features clay and bronze sculptural forms, and monotype paintings. Of the three- dimensional works, a series of bowl and horned bowl shapes come closest to conventional ceramic vessels. The bowls are developed into sculpturally massive presences, though, with the functional origin indicated only in terms of a shallow dip, like a stone-carved font. The bronze is finished with a subdued, variegated patina, sometimes mingling browns, russets and green to sombre effect.

The horned bowls are oddly unsettling, as though the form has become unstable and is metamorphosing, like a snail retracting its horns, perhaps. This feeling is augmented elsewhere by Landweer's use of asymmetry in shapes that prompt us to expect symmetry. There are also several examples of flattened, bell-like objects which, in their narrower format, are phallic, or like cartoon cacti. While they sport no needles, there is an armoured, rebarbative quality to virtually all of the sculptural pieces - as though each draws in considerable amounts of volume and then guards and defends it.

The painted monotypes are far more convivial. There's a lot of give and take in the interplay of the elegant curvilinear shapes that make up the compositions, and some beautiful, subdued colouring. They are more relaxed and in the end more sympathetic works than the sculptures.

Nigel Rolfe's archive quality prints in Absence and Loss at the Graphic Studio Gallery feature close-up studies of individual flowers, usually withering. The starkly framed images, with each stem photographed against a black background, recall the taxonomic projects of Karl Blossfeldt and Ernst Fuhrmann in the early decades of the 20th century. But whereas their intentions were, while aesthetically striking, primarily scientific, Rolfe is interested in looking at flowers as symbols, carriers and repositories of human feeling.

Flowers have myriad ritualistic functions in relation to life and death. By using withered blooms, he underlines the traditional role of the still life as a reminder of the transience of life. While he refrains from giving the botanical names of the plants, the images themselves are powerful reminders of the distinct individual architecture of each bloom. He points the way to the immense mass of individual lives, stories, losses and memories symbolically represented in the form of an image of fading beauty. It is an austere, thoroughly unsentimental, eloquently expressive exhibition.

Reviewed: From Beara to Fez, John Kingerlee, Leinster Gallery, Dublin, until Feb 24 (01-6790834); The Sudden Randomness of the Present, Claire Carpenter, Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until Feb 23 (01-6617286); Sonja Landweer: Recent Works, Peppercanister Gallery, Dublin, until Feb 24 (01-6611279); Flowers: Absence and Loss, Nigel Rolfe, Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin, until Feb 25 (01-6798021)