Spaces charged with promise

VISUAL ARTS:IT'S DE RIGUEUR, when discussing William McKeown's work, to point out that, while at first glance you might think that his paintings are formalist abstractions, in fact they are not, writes AIDAN DUNNE.

The artist himself has said so from the beginning. Yet, as his current exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) clearly demonstrates, the paintings are minimal in form and could plausibly be described as abstract. What, then, is going on beyond the minimal facades they present to the viewer?

Chromatically, Howard Hodgkin is not an obvious point of comparison, but his rationale is strikingly similar to McKeown's, at least as it is outlined by Enrique Juncosa in his catalogue essay; he writes of McKeown's "will to capture precise moments of experience, and to share them, or to offer them to a hypothetical viewer". In place of Hodgkin's palette of many intense colours and multitudinous forms, McKeown veers close to spare monochrome expanses, usually of bleached-out colour, in a standardised format. Looking back over his work in general, this show has, in addition to this schema, several room installations and small-scale, delicately coloured drawings of flowers. The latter are seasonal, cyclical markers; the former an extension of the ideas of space evident in the paintings.

The walls of the first-storey landing of the main staircase could be described as another installation, and form the strongest section of the exhibition. They have been toned down with a shade of one of Farrow Ball's atmospheric off-whites, and the group of paintings hanging there blend beautifully into the softened background to make up a mellow, seamless entity. It's an impressive achievement, but move from this generous arena into the succession of smaller rooms that make up the rest of the show and we're subject to the law of diminishing returns. Each new room reiterates the same basic statement, and then we reach the end - where a series of 30 delicately toned, impeccably quiet watercolours entitled Waiting for the Corncrakelines the corridor. But in a sense the corncrake has arrived before we see most of the show, as a consequence of the Royal Hospital's architectural character.

McKeown is from rural Co Tyrone, and he recalls his father's deference to the arrival of the corncrake and the cuckoo each spring as markers of a natural order that should be respected, an order governing our use of the land. The limitless blue sky, the glow of the sunlight, the harbinger of a bountiful nature, all combined in generating a feeling of freedom and happiness, which he internalised. And his paintings are about happiness, about an immanent happiness, rather than some transcendent possibility of happiness, or happiness licensed by some metaphysical truth or authority. The distinction is central to his vision, not least because it bears on the kind of space we encounter in his paintings. This is, first of all, a potential space, or a space of potential, because it is to some extent left unspecified, and because often we are referred directly to that childhood sense of rightness, to the endless blue sky and the promise of another day.

He has mentioned skies, hope and forever in various works. In her catalogue essay, Corinna Lotz ingeniously points out that the vaulted, tonal pattern characteristic of many of the paintings is also evocative of a human ribcage and, by extension, the body - particularly the smaller works which correspond to a human scale.

She doesn't say whether McKeown prompted this interpretation, but either way it's certainly apposite. Significantly, for the artist, the space he describes is not just a space of possibility, it's an achievable utopian space.

The ragged black borders that feature in the paintings in Imma recall the borders framing photographic negatives, particularly larger-format negatives, boundaries on occasion incorporated in the printed positives by some photographic artists. The idea of a photograph, of an image imprinted by light and emerging from a foggy ground (at least in the pre-digital age), seems altogether consistent with McKeown's aim: it is up to us to make of the space what we will.

Photographically, Richard Misrach's extraordinary images of desert skies, reproduced in The Sky Book, and understandably described as painterly, relate very well to McKeown's paintings, the watercolours especially.

The distinction between his oil paintings and his watercolours has grown over the last 10 years or so, the increasingly off-hand, brusque use of the oil paint contrasting with the smooth, impassive surfaces of the watercolours. Casual spontaneity is set against precise calculation and careful method. While the watercolours always work, the oils, susceptible to the smallest nuances of gesture, are more uneven, and there could be fewer of them here, to better effect.

As a foil to the infinite spaces of the paintings the close-up specificity of the flower drawings make sense, but perhaps they're not quite sure enough of themselves, for example by comparison with English artist Michael Landy's series of etchings of wild flowers.

McKeown's work is optimistic, and there is an openness and liveliness to the work that makes it attractive and engaging. The best of the paintings are very convincing, and often the best of them are the most minimal - such as the foggy cloud of The Narrow Laneand its companion pieces. Of course, it's not just about freedom and happiness, and it would be too glib if it were. The spaces mapped out by the paintings are in a way vacant, though they may be charged with promise, and they do suggest loss in the Freudian sense of the creative impulse: creativity arises from our attempts to generate something from loss and absence. It is a gesture of faith in ourselves and in the world despite the inevitability of loss.

William McKeown: 50 Abstract Paintings, Watercolours and Coloured Pencil Drawingsis at Imma, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin, until Jan 11