Visual Art

VISUAL ART: The Golden Bough: Hybrid Cabinet New works by Ronnie Hughes. Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Parnell Sq Until October 24

The Golden Bough is the overall title of an ongoing series of solo shows curated by Michael Dempsey at the Hugh Lane Gallery. The series has been good so far – it's included a strong installation by Corban Walker, who represents Ireland at Venice next year – and the current exhibition, Hybrid Cabinetby Ronnie Hughes, is certainly one of the best. Hughes, who is based in Co Sligo, is a painter of elegant abstracts. They evidence an interest in systematic attempts to understand the world, with references to, for example, theoretical physics.

Lest that makes them sound too earnest it should be said that they don’t aim to practice physics by other means, they are about systems of thought and knowledge and, vitally, Hughes has a lightness of touch and wry sense of humour that usually comes across in his work. For the Hugh Lane, he’s looked to the origin of the image of the golden bough in “Virgil’s Gnostic allegory”, the Aeneid. Aeneus, the heroic protagonist, is told that he can only survive a visit to the underworld with the protection of the golden bough. For Hughes, the story “connotes a kind of sympathetic magic between man and nature and, by extension, the ‘divine’”, and is illustrative of the way we continually try to find meaning and order in nature.

“Inherent in both art and science,” he writes, “is the determination to revise, re-examine and reconstitute the world.” His drawings and paintings do this, with tact and humour, and invite us to do so too in the same spirit.

Take two clearly related paintings, Clatterand Fringilla, delicate arrangements of angular geometric patterns. The clue is in the second title. "I see the pairing," Hughes explains, "as akin to a call and response between finches outside my rural studio." The colours, and the patterns take on a beak-like, sound-like character.

He found another pictorial source in the sections of "a dismantled plastic pterodactyl" that "becomes fossilised in the paintings' surface." A beautifully understated linear composition looks even more like a piece of abstract geometry, but is titled Rime, inviting us to read it as a frosty pattern if we so wish. As he notes of his recent work in general, he likes the ambiguous space between accident and design.

The title work, Hybrid, consists of 15 outline drawings. They look, at first sight, like schematic descriptions of creatures of some sort in a natural history museum. Look more closely and each image is actually composed of mirrored layers of "amalgams of consumer products." There's a certain similarity to Michael Craig Martin's wall-drawings of workaday objects, but Hughes's drawings venture into their own terrain.

Finally, a display cabinet in the centre of the room contains a large drawing in which a series of join-the-dots networks form a roughly human shape. It had its beginning in a Chinese acupuncture chart, Hughes notes, but he’s elaborated on it, with the aim of mapping “a unique circuit” suggesting something both physical and immaterial. Here and throughout the exhibition he manages that balancing act with wit and elegance. It’s a beautifully poised show.

Black SunSculpture and drawings by Douglas White, curated by Elaine Byrne. Kevin Kavanagh, Chancery Lane, Dublin. Until September 18

The Black Sun is an alchemical symbol, "a point of darkness but also a seed of light – a transformational point" as Douglas White describes it. His sun is a huge ragged tyre, its tattered strands extended by the addition of twigs. It rules over an exhibition that retains a whiff of something scorched. That's the sheets of MDF laid out on a steel table and called Lichtenberg Table. White has sent an electrical charge along the MDF, point to point, creating his own lightening. The electricity has etched intricate linear patterns, known as Lichtenberg patterns, into the board, producing that acrid residue.

His work is extremely atmospheric in several ways. The gallery is part workshop, part laboratory, part wizard’s lair. One wall is occupied by a series of photographic Octopus Drawings. They were made with octopus ink. You pretty much expect that, once you get a sense of where White is coming from. Which is, as he explains it very well: “Finding something magical within the everyday and revealing it through an action.”

David KingPaintings and sculpture. Cross Gallery, 59 Francis St, Dublin. Until October 2

David King’s work has undergone a transformation since his last show at the Cross Gallery two years or so ago. His paintings on that occasion explored notions of the American gothic with views of houses sourced on the internet. This time, images of any kind, including the gothic, have gone by the board, though there’s still an intimation of something like the internet in what we see in the gallery. At first glance, it seems as if King has plumped wholeheartedly for abstraction. He’s made a series of paintings, each dominated by one or two colours. Their surfaces are slickly polished, though obviously built up incrementally, with a sense of endless working and reworking underlying the finished sheen, a bit like the work of Makiko Nakamura.

King’s paintings evoke the depthless space of the computer or gaming monitor. Rather than being abstract, minimalist objects, they seem to represent the infinity of imagery residing in the virtual reality of an online world. It’s as if the sum of masses of images cancels out the possibility of settling on any single image. King frames his compositions with sharp bands of colour, often including a vivid, electric yellow, and there is a similar, vibrant charge to the main body of the paintings, which fizz with luminescent energy. The undulating lines of three accompanying painted steel sculptures complement this suggestion of seething, inherent energy. It’s a striking show.