Blurring the boundaries

Visual Arts / Aidan Dunne:In one of a series of lectures titled Working Space, the artist Frank Stella suggested that painters, when they are working, are always trying to pin down something that remains tantalisingly beyond the edges of vision. They can never quite catch it.

Although temperamentally quite different from Stella, the New York-based painter Robert Bordo, showing at the Rubicon Gallery, might empathise with the sentiment, given the title of his exhibition, Blind Spot. It immediately puts us on our guard and invites us to be wary about what we are looking at.

There are just seven pieces in the show, and the work could be described as pointedly oblique and understated, and also surprisingly diverse, as though Bordo wants to keep us viewers on our toes and prevent us from assuming that we have him pinned down in terms of stylistic identity.

It makes sense to align his work with a trend in contemporary painting, one that recognises the limits of conventional representational method and formal abstraction, and tries to negotiate a middle path. Bordo can be described as an analytical rather than an expressionist painter, but that doesn't mean that there is no emotion in his work.

In fact, he has a fine-tuned, lyrical touch and is attentive to nuances of form, pattern and colour in a way that could be described as poetic in the best sense of the term. Curtain Call, in which two horizontal monochrome expanses are divided by a busier band of paintwork, can be read as a landscape, muted and elegiac. We might notice that the grey expanse of "sky" is in a sense a curtain, descending on and covering the rest of the painting. Nightfall, or perhaps a graver termination? This gentle, dreamy painting, a nocturne, can accommodate both these interpretations and indeed others.

Quite a different mode, and mood, is evident in Head, which consists of rhythmic, concentric patterns of darting, stubbly brush strokes. It has a graphic, even cartoon-like quality. Could it be a close-up of, literally, stubble on a head? Why not? That is Bordo's way of working, shifting gears easily from painting to painting.

Two paintings in the show, Stonedand Blue Wind, are particularly beautiful. The former introduces an all-over pattern of grayish, stone-like forms, then counterpoints it with smaller white dots, like snowflakes. There is also the unmistakable feeling that we are looking into water.

Very economically, Bordo has created a number of visual conundrums in this apparently simple composition, and the result is that the painting is continually engaging. It keeps us guessing with its peculiar, easy lightness. Blue Windconsists of a more definite image, and evidences something that recurs in his work: a slight edge of anxiety or menace. At first glance, this painting is another nocturne, but the loose grid of dark marks that occupy the evening sky betoken something faintly threatening - insects, ashes, dust? - drifting through the air. Again, the image can support a plurality of readings without becoming exhausted. Bordo's work is initially engaging, and it gains immeasurably from repeated viewings.

The paintings in John Noel Smith's show Liliformat Hillsboro Fine Art look good enough to eat. You always get the feeling from his work that Smith loves oil paint and relishes the painting process. He builds up dense, meaty textures of pure pigment without any sense of the paint getting clotted or bogged down. On the contrary, there's a certain lightness about the finished product, perhaps because it's clear that one mistake and the whole thing would be lost.

In other words, the way he paints, each successive layer depends completely on its interaction with previous layers. Everything works or nothing works, so there's never a feeling that he is painting over a textured ground, which often happens when painters try to use texture.

Most of the works in the show are United Field Paintings that conform to a familiar pattern, further instalments in a series of works that each feature three distinct areas and motifs.

They are really very good, but it's also interesting to see a couple of works that follow on from a more recent development in the UFP format, involving a redistribution of space. These are the Liliform paintings that give the show its title, though any liliform remains elusive.

Fergus Bourke's Connemara Landscapes at the Peppercanister Gallery make up a terrific exhibition. A retrospective at the Gallery of Photography in 2003 gave some idea of his tremendous range and industry. Sadly, Bourke died the following year, and this is the first show devoted entirely to his landscapes. He had a classical eye for composition. That is to say, in practically any situation, he was able to find a beautifully poised and balanced image. The word "find" is of course not exactly appropriate.

It's not the case that Connemara was there waiting for Bourke to point his camera and press the shutter. His skill lies in the way he was able to put the elements of a landscape together, almost as if he was physically building it. He was a perfectionist whose mind was always on the eventual image, and there are numerous stories about the efforts he made to get that image.

In many ways, his vision of Connemara is a familiar one. His pictures concentrate on a traditional view of the western landscape as a vast, wild realm, dotted with small, whitewashed homesteads with corrugated roofs and wind-sculpted trees denoting places of sanctuary and habitation. He brilliantly conveys the pervasive wateriness of the place in several images. It can be argued that this is only part of the story of Connemara, that it harks back to the way things were, and that is true to some extent, but Bourke's Connemara is still there, despite the various incursions of ugly modernity, and he captured it brilliantly.

• Blind Spot by Robert Bordo is at the Rubicon Gallery until Nov 17; Liliform by John Noel Smith is at Hillsboro Fine Art until Nov 3; Connemara Landscapes by Fergus Bourke ends today at the Peppercanister Gallery