Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: There are just seven paintings in Mary Heilmann's The Architecture Of Heaven. They are strongly coloured abstracts, put together with an almost calculatedly casual touch.

Reviewed

Mary Heilmann: The Architecture Of Heaven, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, until June 12th (01-6071116)

Alan Keane & Nicholas May: Solve And Dissolve, Lead White Gallery, Dublin, until April 24th (01-6607500)

Hope Sufferance: Contemporary British Art In Print, Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin, until April 30th (01-6798021)

Chris Wilson & Michael Wann, Bridge Gallery, Dublin, until April 29th (01-8729702)

Carmel Benson: Into The Pattern, Hallward Gallery, Dublin, until April 23rd (01-6621482)

There are just seven paintings in Mary Heilmann's The Architecture Of Heaven. They are strongly coloured abstracts, put together with an almost calculatedly casual touch. They have very definite shapes and formal vocabularies, though neither is consistent throughout all seven works. Their various elements of colour, pattern, line and texture produce a pleasant, atmospheric informality. Heilmann plans her exhibitions as site-specific, coherent groups, and some of the pieces actually read like plans or diagrams.

A note accompanying the work says that, although they use the language of abstraction, her paintings have an individuality that has to do with their "deep connections to life, and especially to the artist's own experiences." How could it be otherwise? Knowing about these connections does not necessarily help us to understand or appreciate the work any more readily.

The most literal painting is probably The Big Wave, which is fairly representational in and even beyond a Howard Hodgkin-like way. Other titles hint at jokey, anecdotal meanings without spelling them out, and largely the work's personal meaning for the artist remains hermetic and parallel to our own experience.

What they do seem to be about is deconstructing and redefining the language of modernist abstraction, largely by humanising it by introducing inconsistencies, false starts and other irregularities.

By mixing pictorial idioms, Heilmann is undercutting the notion of a single, authentic, all-encompassing style, although you could say her signature style then becomes the promiscuous mingling of other styles.

In any case, in this context the tangential references to things beyond the immediate pictorial domain make sense, underlining the nature of her art as contingent, anecdotal and inclusive. These strategies are not unique to Heilmann, although her formulation of them is certainly her own. In the end, though, her work is agreeable, even likeable, without being particularly compelling.

Alan Keane's work in Solve And Dissolve, a two-person show with Nicholas May, lives up to the title. Many of his paintings do seem to occupy a tenuous space between solution and dissolution.

They appear to have come about by a mixture of chance and design, or perhaps chance nudged along in a certain direction plus design. Such processes as freezing and thawing, flowing and congealing come to mind in relation to their layered, Rorschach-test patterns of spreading ink stains and blobs and drips of paint.

Some pieces that feature ink as the sole medium are like patches of melted snow, not so much in appearance as in feeling. But more often Keane seems to use ink, then go on to build up paintings with acrylic and sometimes oil, creating beautiful, complex textures and patterns. Everything seems evanescent and mutable, prone to corrosion, obliteration or transformation, with the artist as a fully engaged but dispassionate observer and adjuster. The beauty that emerges is rough-hewn and unorthodox. Change And Decay would be a reasonable subtitle for a very good show.

May's work is a single composite, a shimmering bas-relief made up of multiple units of a repeated symmetrical pattern. Huge and daunting, it evokes sci-fi sublime with its inexorable quality and its opaque, unyielding surface of jagged spines.

Hope Sufferance offers a chance to see prints by a formidable line-up of contemporary British artists. Peter Kosowicz and Simon Marsh of the Hope (Sufferance) Press, in south London, work with many of the foremost artists around. There is some terrific work here, some familiar, some perhaps not so familiar. We're fairly well acquainted with Hughie O'Donoghue's print work, for example, and it's interesting to see that he acquits himself so well in this company, with several pieces that are easily among the best things in the show.

There is always a lurking suspicion that celebrity artists approach print with a certain cynicism, seeing it as a nice little earner. That doesn't really happen here. There is good work by Marc Quinn, Anish Kapoor, Chris Ofili, Peter Doig and Christopher Le Brun, as well as by longer-established names such as Victor Pasmore and Prunella Clough.

When you factor in celebrity and the sterling difference, some of the prices are daunting, but apart from that it's an extremely approachable show.

Chris Wilson has devised a distinctive way of making layered images about landscape, territory and identity. Working with maps as a base, he creates images that incorporate cartographic markings. They remind us that landscape is territory, claimed, contested, layered with human history. His recent work, at the Bridge Gallery, includes some new developments. By systematically covering over everything on a map of Leinster except the road network, he generates an image of an organic-looking circulatory system. Newfoundland is reduced to a network of lights as seen from space.

In the same gallery, Michael Wann's carbon ink drawings of trees in winter are stark and atmospheric. He alternates views of single, isolated trees with naturalistic woodland scenes. Each tree study is approached as though it is a portrait of an individual - which, in a way, it is. This is taken to its logical conclusion in the 10-piece composite Family Tree.

Carmel Benson's Into The Pattern juxtaposes images of Sheela-na-gigs with boldly patterned north African textiles, giving the strangely austere, exhibitionistic stone carvings a celebratory air. Benson has clearly spent a great deal of time and effort tracking down the Sheelas, and she has an eye for their quirky individuality.

In an accompanying note, she points out that, although debate still surrounds the meaning of the Sheelas, essentially there is no one, fixed meaning. Their role has changed over time, from serving as warnings against the evils of lust to fertility aids and symbols of good luck.

Her own concern is perhaps to keep the images in currency and allow for greater rather than more restricted interpretative possibilities.