When you wish a tree were just a tree

Reviewed:

Sarah Longley, Peppercanister Gallery, Dublin, until October 3rd (01-6611279)

Whispering In Paradise, Eric Roux Fontaine, Bridge Gallery, Dublin, until October 2nd (01-8729702)

Flight From The Forest Under The Sea, Dave Fitzpatrick, City Arts Centre, Dublin, until October 27th (01-6770643)

Sarah Longley is a young representational artist whose subject matter is thoroughly conventional, even conservative. She shows still lifes, views of gardens, self-portraits and nude figure studies, making drawings and paintings with pencil, charcoal and oil. Yet there is nothing calculated or ingratiating about her choice of subject or the nature of her work. It comes across as truthful, direct and exploratory.

Technically, there is no slickness to her approach. The surfaces of both drawings and paintings are worked and worried over, built up piecemeal from lots of small, provisional marks rather than from, say, the brisk, confident lines and bold swathes of colour exemplified by Matisse or Dufy.

Temperamentally, Longley is closer to Bonnard, though she is a northern European Bonnard, at home with sullen winter light and the northern sensibility. Her images, with their uneasy surfaces, their refusal of facile effects, have a kind of moody truculence about them.

In her flower studies, particularly, she explores colour. Here, her handling of oil paint, in thin, fluid, translucent layers, almost as though it is watercolour, owes something to Neil Shawcross, but where he goes for pure, vivid colour, she is invariably inclined to bring it down several tones. She is, in fact, a predominantly tonal painter, not quite at ease with intense colour, and her drawings are also tonal: hardly linear at all.

Hence her liking for shadows. In her almost invariably contre-jour figure drawings, her subject, usually sprawling and relaxed, is built up in expanses of soft grey charcoal shadows (she is noticeably more comfortable on a large scale in her drawings than in her paintings). Head, torso, hips and thighs are dark, concentrated masses, accentuated by folded or extended limbs. These subdued, intimate studies impart a sense of melancholy isolation typical of the work as a whole.

It is there, for example, in her fine, understated self-portrait studies and garden compositions. These, she mentions in a catalogue note, are based largely on views of the Royal Botanic Garden from the windows of her Edinburgh studio.

They are the most spatially complex things in the show, their interlocking patterns of light and shade setting up labyrinthine pathways for our eyes to negotiate. Often, there is a tiny figure or two tucked away in the composition, and the scenes are charged with a slight unease, a sense of vague foreboding.

All this is achieved by virtue of Longley's patient application of a careful, descriptive method as she traces the precise shape of spidery tree limbs or, indeed, depicts each species of tree as a distinct individual. The strength of her work rests not only on her assiduous attention to the demands of each area of subject matter, but also, very much, on the consistency of her dark-edged vision. It will be interesting to see which direction her work takes in the future.

Eric Roux Fontaine, in his show Whispering In Paradise, has devised a singular working method involving "gum arabic, resin, raw pigment, gold and silver leaf", as well as irregular sheets of thick, rough-textured paper, to produce attractive, luxuriant works that are both visual and tactile in their appeal. His pictures have the chromatic intensity and decorative intricacy of illuminated manuscripts, and an almost sculptural presence. So far, so good.

There is a tweeness about his imagery, however, which consists of stylised representations of animals, notably hens picking the ground. Dogs, horses, fruit and trees also feature. It's not that there is anything wrong with images of domesticated animals and plants, or that you cannot make great art by depicting them, but there is a feeling that Roux Fontaine has expended so much skill and ingenuity on the form that he didn't have enough left over to do justice to the content. While he has made beautiful decorative images, in terms of art one longs for something more, or something more substantial.

There is an immense quantity of work in Dave Fitzpatrick's Flight From The Forest Under The Sea. The title presumably refers to his use of various woods recovered from sea and bogland, and specifically to a piece that incorporates a tree from a drowned forest that was uprooted and thrown onto land during a severe storm, setting the tone for a flight motif.

Wood is his primary material. Next in importance is metal (he also shows some tentative figures drawings). He likes to take the natural form of found pieces of wood and, mostly, give it a spin through selective modification, editing and carving.

The rough-hewn quality of much of the carving, and the Heart Of Darkness intimations of some of the imagery, suggest the ideas simmering away in the background have at least partly to do with primitive ritual and transformative experience.

While there is a core of strong pieces in the show, there is far too much work on view, particularly given that Fitzpatrick's sculpture has an emphatic physical presence but is devoid of a sense of subtlety, and the more the pieces are worked the more heavy-handed they are likely to become. He is also distinctly inclined to overindulge a tendency towards sentimental anthropomorphism. A lot of the time, you wish he'd just let a tree be a tree.