Times past in a paper trail

VISUAL ART/Aidan DunneReviewed: Tony O'Malley: 50 Years, Taylor Galleries ended Nov 23rdMarkings: Tony O'Malley and Jane O'Malley, Graphic Studio Gallery until Dec 7th (01-6798021)Now and Then: Michael Coleman, Cross Gallery until Nov 30th (01 473 8978)House to House, Rita Duffy, Lead White Gallery, ended Nov 26th (01-6607500)Abacus: Louise Neiland, 25/26 Gt Strand Street, ended Nov 23rdPledge: Susan Philipsz, Temple Bar Gallery until Nov 30th (01- 6710073)

The recent Tony O'Malley exhibition at the Taylor Galleries, 50 Years, was cautiously billed as a selective retrospective of works on paper. It was selective not only in numeric terms, because he has been a prolific artist throughout most of those 50 years, but also in the view of his work that the show offered. He has always drawn his inspiration from his immediate circumstances and surroundings and, despite the stylised or abstracted nature of much of what he has done, he has never been an abstract artist, so that his work is a day-to-day, even hour-to-hour record of his life.

The rhythmic markings that are a feature of his style suggest the passage of time, and he is usually quite specific about time and place in identifying particular paintings.

Often, too, the work is anecdotally specific, and it is this aspect that was to the fore in the Taylor Gallery selection. So much so that the show could be seen as being, in large part, a personal, autobiographical chronicle, all the more so given that the work on paper is faster, more immediate, more like a diary than larger paintings are likely to be.

From Callan (and back to Callan) and Enniscorthy to Cornwall and the Bahamas, studios and work-rooms, self-portraits and portraits of his wife, Jane, and friends like the potter, Bernard Leach - with some quirky copies of work by Breughel and others - the show had the feeling of a personal scrapbook about it, an intimate and touching journal.

Markings, at the Graphic Studio Gallery, features recent graphic work by both Tony and Jane O'Malley. His images have an abstract serenity about them, her's are more spiky. An incisive line marks out beautiful, spare, still life compositions, vividly coloured. Some fine black-and-white etchings of Clare Island extend her tonal range very successfully.

Michael Coleman's Now and Then, at the Cross Gallery, has been substantially reorganised two or three times during its run. The bulk of the exhibition is concentrated in the largest room, with just a single canvas in the first room.

This painting, with pink showing through thickly over-painted black, is recognisably a Coleman: tending toward minimal abstraction, but with an edgy volatility, an unpredictability about it.

On the evidence of the show's main room, no artist works harder at trying to second-guess himself. Casually distributed, leaning against the walls, two or more deep are two composite Glitter Paintings. As the titles suggest, their busy surfaces are further agitated by liberal applications of glitter, so that when you walk in it's as if you're seeing masses of brightly wrapped presents.

Hanging above these sparkling works is a line of unframed works on paper. These are straightforwardly representational, informal wash-coloured drawings and they detail the landscape of Coleman's daily life, from his home in Reginald St to the Ha'penny Bridge, St Stephen's Green and the swimming pool at the Merrion Hotel, plus a number of less identifiable interiors and details. They are crisply and stylishly made.

But what comes across most is Coleman's lively, provocative intelligence, and the fact that he loves setting problems for himself.

Rita Duffy's House to House, which has just finished its run at Lead White Gallery and is now moving onto an unusual exhibition venue - Stormont - centres on a series of informal portraits of women. Boldly drawn, linear likenesses are inscribed on troubled, multi-coloured areas of paint.

There is a sense of these being transitory, provisional images, perhaps reflecting the fact that these women were encountered by the artist at Quaker House, where they recounted their experiences of The Troubles.

Their individual fragmentary narratives are woven into video images of Duffy's paintings sited in the disused Armagh Women's Prison - oddly beautiful in its paint-peeling dilapidation. Six of the heavy, old prison doors, arranged around a cascade of glass teardrops, make up a related sculptural work, Veil. The overall project, in giving voice to those whose experiences have no public forum, is important, particularly when it occupies Stormont.

Louise Neiland is a very capable painter who has formulated her own distinctive style of metaphysical realism.

There is a sombre, subdued quality to the work in her recent show Abacus at 25/26 Gt Strand Street. A series of ruminative paintings explored the notion of objective, physical measurement as a corollary of subjective, emotional experience. That, at any rate, seems to emerge as the dominant idea. The strength of her work, apart from its technical virtues, is its atmospheric consistency, the way she evokes a strange but consistent, self-contained imaginative world.

Positioning is vital in the audio works of Susan Philipsz, and positioning makes her current piece Pledge, in the Temple Bar Gallery, both a stark, intense experience and one that seems oddly displaced by being sited in rather than outside the gallery.

She is currently based in Berlin, and the piece consists of a recording of her singing the song Rosa Luxemburg against what sounds like workaday city background noises.

Physically, you encounter an empty space and four audio speakers in the gallery, but it is tempting to imagine what the effect might be if the speakers were sited out in a quiet public space, maybe somewhere near Liberty Hall or Leinster House, where passers-by might encounter it by chance rather than design, and where its political resonance might be heightened - where the work might be tested a little. Within the preserve of the gallery, it is a little too comfortable, too self-approving.