Brian Bourke

The press release for this exhibition proffers a link between Brian Bourke and the exhibition of Picasso's drawings at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery. The comparison is based on the feeling that Bourke shares something of the modern master's intense creative energy. It's a fair observation.

But if we are to indulge comparisons with great artists, van Gogh springs more readily to mind. Bourke's drawings and paintings are in many respects one and the same, as brush and line are interchangeable, darting around the compositions as van Gogh's did.

Further still, Bourke's artwork has a similar nervous energy, where you sense that the artist never allows himself to overwork any part of the painting, giving a vital energy and vibrancy to his style.

This show can be neatly divided into those drawings and paintings produced in and around Ballinskelligs, in Co Kerry, and a series of self-portrait drawings, hung to great effect in the vault space.

In the latter, the intensity of the artists' investigation is most keenly felt, as a series of drawings relentlessly studies his own features. Poses showing him singing or sticking out his tongue mutate into mask images - even the studies of a human skull could be Bourke's - such is the intensity of these drawings.

A bronze self-portrait painted a vibrant cerulean blue lurks in an alcove at the end of the series and seems a logical conclusion (although it was produced before some of the drawings). But this chronological detail hardly matters, as the sculpture has an undeniably powerful presence, staring outwards like an irascible demagogue.

Runs until October 8th