Negotiating images of home and away

VISUAL ART:JOHN NOEL SMITH's abstract paintings in his Pandectseries, at Hillsboro Fine Art, are beautiful things. Visually they're not at all complicated. Central panels, inscribed with networks of cross-hatched linear marks of a single colour on a paler ground, are flanked by two flat-painted, monochrome panels. There are some variations and elaborations on this basic scheme, but not many. It might sound quite minimal and uninvolving, not something likely to offer much in the way of visual goodies.

Smith, though, is a felicitous painter. Recently, having been panned by the critics for his lack of painting ability, Damien Hirst has gone on the record to say painting is no big deal and anyone can learn to paint like Rembrandt. Maybe he’s thinking of pundit Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, which stems from the observation that expertise to the level of virtuosity in any area is dependent on putting in 10,000 hours working at it. It’s quite likely that Smith, born in 1952 and painting full-time since his late teens, has put in many multiples of those 10,000 hours.

Mind you, his record proves he was always good at handling paint, with great feeling for colour and texture. And even if you were persuaded by Gladwell’s formula, it seems fair to say that each individual artist brings something else to the table apart from technical expertise. Their sensibility, for one thing, and their personality, and myriad other factors that contribute to how their work turns out. Technically, there’s no question but that Smith is exceptionally capable, even unsurpassable. He’s on a par with any painter currently working not just in Ireland but anywhere.

What else, in terms of sensibility and personality, does he bring to what we see in the Hillsboro? Keep track of his work over a number of years and certain qualities become apparent. He likes themes and schemes that underlie a series of paintings in a metaphorical, or analogical, or at times representational way. These have included Ogham, the ingredients for an Irish stew, The Wind in the Willows, towers in the landscape, topology, aspects of theoretical physics and, now, Pandect, a term that means a complete body of laws, or a study covering any subject in its entirety.

Partly because he lived in Berlin for over 20 years, several of these subjects related to a preoccupation with identity in general and Irish identity in particular: home thoughts from abroad. Obviously so in terms of the Irish stew perhaps, less obviously in terms of unified field theory in physics. But the underlying notion of drawing disparate things together – in unifying the four fields of Ireland, for example – is relevant not just to physics but to numerous areas of endeavour.

The paintings are in a sense about the subjects evoked by their titles, but mainly to the extent that those subjects symbolise or resemble or share certain qualities with others, with, for example, the practice of painting.

This is not to say that Smith makes art about art, more art about languages, conventions, rules, theories, ways of understanding and trying to deal with the world. His paintings are a hugely energetic, ongoing conversation: picking up a subject, working through it, analysing it comparatively and intrinsically, interrogating it, adding to it and perhaps discarding it. Smith is formally adept, even expert, as a painter, but what really characterises and indeed energises his work in the end is its infectious, enthusiastic engagement with the world’s diversity and complexity on a number of levels.

DONALD TESKEY'S Loops & Sidingsat the Rubicon sees him look back to earlier phases of his work and expand on its ideas. While, some years ago, he enjoyed a residency at the Albers Foundation (which has, incidentally, been really good for Irish artists) in an outstanding woodland setting in rural Connecticut, and made a series of pastoral paintings, since exhibited, he occasionally slipped away from the woods and boarded a train to one of the nearest cities.

The landscapes of railways on the outskirts and in the thick of cities have a distinctive, gritty nature, cutting through the urban fabric and exposing its rough edges. On his various trips, from his train carriage, Teskey shot video footage on his mobile phone of these lines drawn through cities. These video clips form the basis of the paintings in Loops & Sidings. They are urban landscapes that incorporate several different kinds of space: expanses of track, boundary walls embellished with graffiti, rails and other fittings, bridges and the jumble of the city beyond.

Increasingly in recent years, Teskey has turned to the rural landscape, most spectacularly to the coast, in Co Cork and then near Ballycastle in North Mayo, which has been an enormous source of inspiration for him. And of course, there's the woodland of rural Connecticut and elsewhere. Earlier on, though, he became known for his urban landscapes, and they were not only emphatically urban, they had certain qualities that connect them to the Loops & Sidingspictures.

They usually have a great sense of movement to them, for example, imparting a great feeling of the city as seen while making your way through it, on foot, negotiating the labyrinth of its roads and laneways, its railway lines and canals. The idea of making paintings of fragments of urban environment as glimpsed from the disorientating perspective of a moving train is a logical extension of his earlier city landscapes, and it’s resulted in at least a couple of paintings that rank with his best to date.

PandectSeries: New paintings by John Noel Smith. Hillsboro Fine Art, Parnell Sq W, Dublin Until Nov 20; Loops & Sidings: Recent work by Donald Teskey. Rubicon Gallery, St Stephen's Green, Dublin Until Dec 11