Subtle approach gets the message across

John Duncan's Boom Town at the Gallery of Photography is a terrific exhibition. The title refers to present-day Belfast which, like Dublin in the recent past, has become a veritable Crane City as a huge wave of development transforms the environment.

Reviewed:

John Duncan, Boom Town,

Gallery of Photography until July 24th (01-6714654); Fabulations of Form, Arthouse until Sep 7th (01-6056800); Paul Doran, paintings, Green on Red Gallery until July 27th (01-6713414) Gillian Lawler, paintings, Cross Gallery until July 7th (01-4738978)

The show's work falls into two, perhaps even three, categories, and it is the divergent perspectives that lend it real force. The main strand is a series of photographs of building sites.

There is a hollowness at the heart of this commercial hype, something that comes across even in these images but is explicitly apparent elsewhere; in, for example, a view of the infamous de Lorean sports car - and in another series of more general cityscapes featuring expanses of cleared, open ground awaiting development. The scoured, blank sites suggest the desire for a tabula rasa on which the city's new history can be written. The show's real sting in the tail, though, is in the form of a set of images of North Belfast, where old history asserts itself in all-too-familiar ways.

As ever, Duncan's approach is low key. We do not see riots and angry faces, just streets and buildings, calmly and cooly depicted. But the devil is in the detail. A relatively ordinary street turns out, on closer inspection, to be densely inscribed with marks of violence in a way that is genuinely shocking. Although the work is framed in terms of series, of groups of images, Duncan does have an eye for the individual image, as in his view of suburban couches facing a huge hole in the wall of a derelict building.

He works very much within the new documentary style of "objective" realism, with an emphasis on spaces and buildings that recalls the Bechers and their students in Germany. His approach, and the consistent pictorial strength of his photographs relate them to Paul Seawright. Most importantly, though, Boom Town is a valuable and outstanding account of what might be termed the city in history.

Fabulations of Form, curated by Sarah Pierce, features video pieces by three artists and uses the frankly awkward exhibition spaces of Arthouse very effectively. Pierce's idea is to show works that relate to the properties of the medium in unorthodox and revealing ways. Hence Matthew Bakkom's Condensation is a strangely engrossing one-minute 30-second loop that repeatedly rushes us through an entire feature film by abstracting one frame for every five seconds of original screen time.

While, like the soundtrack, the wider meanings and context of the narrative are of course lost, the striking thing is just how readable the film is in its exceptionally compressed form, because we are so used to the visual narrative conventions it employs. Carola Dertnig's fascinating Dancing With Remotes takes another tack. A group of her friends dance to techno music in her studio. Each of them has a remote control, which enables them to stop and start the video camera monitoring their dancing. Again the result is curiously gripping, not alone for the odd patterning of the jump-cuts, but also for such details as people's varying and distinctive ways of using the remote.

Alan Phelan's piece has an extraordinary, involved premise that is too tedious to outline, particularly given that the end result is disappointing and obscure. Yes, it is supposed to be obscure, but that isn't necessarily a convincing excuse.

Paul Doran's paintings, at Green on Red, are concentrations of paint - literally so in that he builds them up layer over layer to create implausibly thick sculptural masses of oil pigment. More often than not the physical substance of the painting looks as if it is not going to manage to cling onto the support and presumably some of them, in the making stage, don't. What we get are a series of small - no bigger than one-foot square - works that have incredibly density of presence. Their scale seems just right.

There is a dominant right-to-left horizontal accent in the paintings, the surfaces of which bear a passing resemblance to waves breaking across the canvas - often featuring a second, supplementary wave crest about halfway across. They also suggest other referents: thick, opened books, for example. Their edges, hugely encrusted with bulging paint cornices, and their surfaces, with wet-on-wet layers of colour intermingling, are packed with information about their constituent stages and the choices made along the way. Doran exploits the sheer lusciousness of oil paint with zeal, but he avoids becoming a confectioner, retaining a toughness of vision about the whole thing. He has made works that are almost hypnotic in their intensity, providing us with plenty of food for thought.

Gillian Lawler at the Cross Gallery is a textural painter, and a good one. But while she is drawn to muted, tonal expanses, she also has a flair for colour, throwing in minute, strategic touches of red and larger tracts of beautiful pale greens and blues. She makes scarred, weathered-looking surfaces that suggest the accumulated marks of time in natural or urban settings. Some touches recall the great Catalan painter Antonio Tapies, but in a more careful, refined vein, at some remove from his gruff, authoritative manner.

Having established a characteristic surface, Lawler introduces various breaks and intrusions in the form of metallic or other additions to the fabric of the painting, or simply in the form of expanses of colour and, occasionally, in the form of literal tears, holes in the canvas. There is a distinct sense that she views the space of the painting as a strange, transformative zone, as, not untypically, in catalogue no 16, where a plank of wood, intruding roughly from the "outside" world, assumes a different, ghostly presence in the picture space. That work, plus nos 5, 8 and 14 (everything in the show is untitled), are the best pieces from an artist who is shaping up to be a very interesting painter.