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VISUAL ART:TWO FINE SOLO exhibitions currently running in Dublin are representative of a significant strand of contemporary art and, more specifically, painting. The two artists, both fairly young, are Ciarán Murphy, at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, and Damien Flood, at Green on Red. It’s not that their work is of a piece: they are each following distinct, separate lines of enquiry. But both show paintings, mainly quite small in scale and sparing of colour, with an approach to subject matter that is at once allusive and ambiguous. And as images per se, what they do could be described as fragmentary and oblique.

Murphy, we are told, works from photographs. In fact he collects lots of photographs from different sources, images that seem to him to hold out the possibility of a painting. A photographic look comes through in the paintings he makes from them, but often in a very spare, selective way, as though he is leaving much of the information out of the image. He’s not just simplifying or streamlining it, that is to say, he’s actually making something almost abstract. So there’s nothing of the style called photorealist about his approach.