invisible cities, Paul Seawright, Kerlin Gallery until Dec 17 01-6709093 Gislebertus Told Me, Paul Doran, Green on Red Gallery until Dec 23 01-6713414 A&E: Art and the Experience, John Roch Simons, Bank of Ireland Arts Centre until Dec 3
Paul Seawright's invisible cities are in Africa. There are photographs from four of them, including Lagos (which, it is predicted, will be the second-largest city in the world by 2015), Johannesburg, Lusaka and Addis Ababa. As anyone familiar with his work will know, Seawright does not set about making photo-essays in the tradition of Life magazine. He tries to find images that are in a sense anti-reportage: no narratives of famine and relief efforts, or conflict and violence. It's as if they feature the spaces left out of reportage images.
The first piece is a view of distant, improvised-looking buildings shrouded in mist. Seawright seems to be hinting, perhaps a bit too broadly, that, metaphorically speaking, we cannot really see what we are looking at. Apart from the note accompanying the show, which names the four cities, there isn't much in the way of additional clues. All the works are minimally titled, and we are not told directly which city any image depicts, never mind what is going on.
Seawright has tended to prefer traces of human presence to pictures of people, as though the question of portraiture is another kind of narrative diversion. In this body of work, though, there are several quite close-up images of individuals, all amenable to definite lines of interpretation, if all remaining ultimately ambiguous.
A man lies sprawled, apparently resting, in his small, crowded print shop; a woman sits in a chair on a narrow street, a man close behind her; another woman and her child are the only occupants of a big, spartanly appointed waiting room. They are all absorbed in their own thoughts, and they are not there to make any particular newsworthy point to us: us being a prototypical Western audience.
Recurrently, there is a sense of a superficial layer of modernity sitting uneasily on a vast underlying physical fabric. In Untitled (Pylon), the title structure towers over a stretch of makeshift housing, precariously sited at water's edge; in Untitled (Dolphin Estate) sections of motorway look as if they might come apart.
Seawright is exceptionally attentive to the textures of things, not only the luminescent grey of the mist, and to the ochres of the earth, but to the wear and tear of fabricated, functional spaces, spaces that are always brutally impersonal in terms of their design and their use. Overlying the drawing board schemes of planners are the improvisational efforts of real people.
Paul Doran's Gislebertus Told Me at Green on Red marks a distinct change in the work of a painter best known for small canvases composed of improbably thick masses of oil paint. The extraordinarily rich, meaty pigment pushed at the physical limitations of the medium, implying such questions as: when is a painting no longer a painting? That question, in relation to the quasi-sculptural presence of his work, may give a clue to the meaning of the title of his current show.
Gislebertus was a sculptor, active in France in the first half of the 12th century, and celebrated chiefly for the remarkable tympanum on a facade of Autun Cathedral, made during a flowering of Burgundian art. This complex sculptural relief is, exceptionally, credited exclusively to him, literally written in stone. It's a stunning piece of spatial organisation, renowned for its expressive individuality, with its many smaller figures deeply modelled. Another piece from Autun, depicting Eve in the Garden of Eden, is regarded as unrivalled in medieval art.
Judging by his new paintings, for Doran, Gislebertus is poised at the beginning of a period of unprecedented exploration in Western art. In fact, while the angularity of abrupt, interrupted rhythms, the surprising sensuality and heightened awareness of sculptural space characteristic of Gislebertus all have their counterparts in Doran's paintings, he is surely also giving consideration to the early Renaissance, and more to painting than sculpture.
Time and again he sets out to build spatial frameworks - build is the appropriate term given his use of masonry-like buffs and greys, and his practice of applying collaged sections of paint. But the establishment of spatial illusion is always thwarted, by flat contradiction, so to speak, or gradual dispersal, or by subtle interruption.
The paintings are less overtly attractive than before, and more demanding: the use of colour is lush, but in a much more restrained way, and the pictorial grammar has been expanded and treated with critical suspicion. Yet, while in appearance the new work is radically different from Doran's prior output, it is nonetheless another stage of the same conversation.
In A&E: Art and the Experience, John Roch Simons has had the interesting idea of making work about the reception of contemporary art, focusing on a normally invisible component of the process: the audience. His photographic pieces record people at points of contact with art, including works by Damien Hirst in the Saatchi Museum, for example. Slick photographic images are framed by rough hewn swatches of pigment, as though to remind us that contemporary artworks are still things made, despite the prevalence of technology. Rather bravely, he has even produced his own version of Tracey Emin's tent, in which the subject becomes the artworld rather than Emin's inner, emotional world.
In all this he is encouraging us to ask ourselves what is on our minds when we are party to the spectacle of contemporary art. Most of his audience members look as if they are having a reasonable time, though they can also look a bit lost and aimless. Perhaps Roch Simons has in mind an element of disorientation when he blurs and abstracts his images, turning them into patterns of coloured light, or perhaps those flares of colour are the other space into which art can potentially take us.
