A caustic approach to the refined world of abstraction

Visual Art/Aidan Dunne: Reviewed Sergej JensenDouglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Mon-Fri 11am-6pm, Thurs 11am-7pm, Sat 11am-4.45pm Until May 5 01-8961116 Tabling a Motion Motioning a Table, Philip Napier and Mike HoggTemple Bar Gallery, 5-9 Temple Bar Tues-Sat 11am-6pm Thurs 11am-7pm Until Apr 21 01-6710073

Sergej Jensen's exhibition at the Douglas Hyde consists of paint and textile works that have a subdued, slightly forlorn quality, but also exude an air of understated elegance. This is partly because the work is very much at home in the specific environment of the gallery with its slabs of unadorned concrete, mottled with subtle variegations.

Jensen favours muted grey and earth hues in the fabrics he chooses to stitch together or collage in his patchwork compositions, and he rarely disturbs their even tonality, apart from tastefully framing an area with a dark accent or laying on a few lines of pigment. So the whole thing, paintings and setting, make up an ensemble piece.

So far it sounds as if it might be a piece of tasteful, minimalist interior decoration, and in a sense it is, with enough going on to engage the eye and the mind, to make you look again. It is also rather downbeat, to the extent that you might dismiss it as being drab and dispiriting. One approach to the work might be to say that Jensen is taking aspects of the language of minimal abstraction (not minimalism as such), as exemplified by William Scott, to take an example relatively close to home, and pushing it a bit further or perhaps subverting it somewhat.

Part of his process entails using caustic liquids to bleach or stain his fabrics, introducing a note of conscious carelessness or discord into the refined vocabulary of abstraction. We can view it as a humanising gesture, another example of a strategy employed by many artists. The work of Italian artist Alberto Burri, who trained as a doctor, and served in the army during the second World War, is one pertinent example. In his paintings, Burri sewed sections of rough sacking together over a blood-like red ground that tended to seep through and was exposed in patches. He went on to develop this idea, using singed and burned sacking and wood among other materials.

His work is very powerful, though it has a more melodramatic character than Jensen's. His, by contrast, is quiescent and introspective. In Burri's postwar canvasses, despite the horrific nature of the imagery running through his abstract compositional frameworks, his very assertiveness implies a regenerative potential, a confidence in the future. With Jensen, it is as if we have moved into a post-modern era of resignation and abjection. There is a pathetic quality to the way the discolourations, recalling leaks and blemishes, the stuff of everyday domesticity, undermine any appeal to the transcendental.

Jensen's work is quietly persuasive. He certainly has a feeling for composition, texture, pattern and colour. And the fact that it looks so well in the gallery makes a visit rewarding. Oddly enough though, on a second visit this viewer, for one, found that the work wasn't holding up well to considered scrutiny, and already seemed exhausted - but then, maybe it's supposed to look tired.

Transport and storage bags, woven by nomadic women in the Middle East, make up the complementary exhibition in Gallery 2. While they are objects of great beauty, they come across as misplaced in this context, mostly hung on the wall.

Unsurprisingly, tables occupy centre stage in Philip Napier and Michael Hogg's Tabling a Motion Motioning a Table at Temple Bar Gallery. The two main pieces feature real tables, but sculptural intervention has re-cast them as objects of symbolic import. They are both elements in an ongoing three-year project, The Soft Estate, commissioned by Craigavon Borough Council, and which takes the form, in Peter Richards's description, of "a series of works that are developing around aspects of negotiated and participatory practice in the public realm". The public realm of particular relevance here is Northern Ireland, and the fact and figure of speech of the negotiating table clearly took root in the minds of both artists as a means of visualising the complex, multi-layered process of negotiation that has been at the heart of the peace process and various agreements along the way.

It is noticeable that fudging and ambiguity have been vital elements of this process. Both sides can adhere to their own, to some extent mutually exclusive versions of what a particular wording means and yet, somehow, despite the disparities, a stumbling, lurching, fragile form of progress is made.

Napier and Hogg's collaboration is in itself a negotiation process and in a way this exhibition, and other stages of The Soft Estate, seem to offer the kind of idealised space apart, an arena for social interaction and progress outside of those officially sanctioned, that is the aim of an entire strand of contemporary art. In the event, though, they come across as being distinctly wary and critically engaged, and are hesitant about making any such claims. Certainly what we see in the gallery takes the form of rather sardonic visual puns indicative of the difficulties and limitations of negotiation.

One table that is part of the series, though not included in the present show, makes the point: it is a facsimile of the table from the captain's cabin on the Titanic, not the most optimistic symbol imaginable in the context. In Temple Bar, a traditional dining table has been bisected but, rather than being extended to a realistic degree, the two halves are separated by a vast gulf, tenuously linked by a sagging arrangement of lengths of timber temporarily held together by various woodworking cramps.

The other major piece is a more contemporary table, transformed into a bucking bronco by virtue of being bolted to an electronic motor. It's an hypnotically watchable work. The bottom line, though, is that Hogg and Napier point to the gulf between participants in negotiations, to the improvisatory, temporary nature of platforms of agreement, and to the difficulties of finding a forum in the first place, a symbolic "table" that can accommodate the concerns and priorities of all interested parties.

The title The Soft Estate is apparently a term for that ambiguous space between the hard shoulder and the space beyond the road and, in relation to Hogg and Napier's project, the potentially useful gaps in otherwise fixed systems such as, presumably, the gap between agreement on devolution and May 8th next.