A serene vision of Vienna

VISUAL ART:EITHNE JORDAN'S SHOW of paintings at the Rubicon Gallery is called Night in a City.The city is unspecified but it is, an explanatory note informs us, Vienna. There's an echo of Jules Dassin's London-set film Night and the Cityin the title but not in the mood of the exhibition, writes AIDAN DUNNE

And in terms of its location, the same could be said of Carol Reed's The Third Man, a great deal of which is set during the hours of night in a sinister, postwar Vienna. Like many films that focus on the nighttime metropolis, both are dark thrillers exploring a seamy underworld, stories of double-crosses and badness. Jordan's Vienna, by contrast, is serene, its streets and spaces quiet and deserted, softened by a light covering of snow.

It’s not that there’s anything particularly cosy about her pictures. They are actually quite impassive and reserved. The places they feature are not landmarks and highlights, but ordinary, functional districts, of apartment and office blocks and carefully tended municipal squares, urban landscapes that might belong to almost any European city. The occasional parked car and illuminated window hints at the human presence, but we don’t directly see anyone. If there’s a loneliness to the images it’s a pleasurable loneliness, deriving from a contemplative engagement with the muted environment.

Yet it’s appropriate to mention a cinematic echo because there is something cinematic about the works. It comes through in the sense imparted of making one’s way through and observing the city, in puzzling over aspects of what we see and, oddly enough, in the absence of people in a densely inhabited place. Emptied of people, the scenes are charged with anticipation, not specifically foreboding, though.

There’s an openness to them that allows us to take them any way we might like to.

In their vacated spaces we’re also free to appreciate the poetry of the architectural environment in an almost abstract way, a way that recalls the work of Giorgio Morandi. One could also mention Edward Hopper, but Hopper usually uses architecture to stage human dramas. As with both those artists, Jordan simplifies the detail of her imagery.

Her brushwork is sparing and undemonstrative, yet there is a wonderful vitality to the paintings.

A glance at the record shows that she is not at all averse to figuration. She has several series of figurative paintings to her credit and people have appeared in a small number of her urban landscapes which, besides Vienna, include locations in Rotterdam, Berlin, Barcelona and Paris, as well as the countryside close to her house near Montpellier in France. The latter are more landscapes per se, of course, but the countryside as depicted by her is a manufactured terrain, shaped by habitation, road construction and agriculture. She has also made landscapes based on North Mayo. Night in a City is a beautifully poised, considered show.

PAULETTE PHILLIPS'S History appears twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, at the NCAD Gallery, deals with a fascinating body of material, rich enough to form the basis of a full- length documentary film, or perhaps a novel. The show is about the tangled story of the villa built by Eileen Gray on a stunning site overlooking the Bay of Monaco in the South of France, designated E 1027 by her and her lover, Jean Badovici – it's an encoded form of both their initials. Subsequently E 1027 was wrongly attributed by some to Le Corbusier, who built a house nearby, painted murals on E 1027 against Gray's express wishes, and seems to have been obsessed by her and her architectural achievement. He eventually had a fatal heart attack while swimming in the sea within sight of E 1027.

When she and Badovici separated, Gray never returned to the villa, and her reputation fell into relative obscurity even as Le Corbusier’s soared. There is persuasive evidence that he had a hand in eclipsing her work. The villa was abandoned and deteriorated over the years. Latterly it has been restored – including the murals that Gray never wanted in her building. Phillips prowls the “haunted site” with a hand-held video camera prior to its restoration and incorporates replicas of some of the furniture Gray designed for the house, and of the murals, with some other elements.

It’s an extraordinary story, but, while her show is certainly never less than interesting, Phillips doesn’t really make the most of its subject or bring anything very much to it. Looking at her video footage one thinks that she might have done so much more.

MAURICE COCKRILL, a cross-section of whose work is showing at Hillsboro Fine Art, is a formidable painter. He is also the current Keeper of the Royal Academy in London, but if you expect his work to be cautious, dry and academic, his paintings are likely to confound you. Now into his 70s, he has adhered to the idea that painting involves the exercise of skill and experience but, given that stricture, he's been exceptionally restless and inventive in his approach.

Early, realistic works have given way to more abstract compositions. Underlying everything is a dialogue between structure and amorphousness, probably best articulated in the superb work he’s done since the beginning of the 1990s: sinuous, linear and quick-witted.

Many of the paintings made since then are on a par with someone such as the American artist Terry Winters. The distinctions between academic and avant garde are no longer what they once were.

Night in a City, Rubicon Gallery, 10 St Stephen's Green Until March 20th; History appears twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, NCAD Gallery, 100 Thomas St Until March 6th; Maurice Cockrill Selected works, Hillsboro Fine Art, 49 Parnell Sq W Until March 6th