Barrie Cooke's watery paintings are quite at home in the Galway Arts Centre, between the River Corrib and the canal that feeds noisily back into it, with the expanse of the bay opening out just down the road. Quite at home as well, if less happily, in that the first works you encounter in the gallery are some of his pollution pictures, for Galway has its share of problems in that regard.
The exhibition is a selective survey of about 12 years' work. It incorporates several pieces never exhibited before and is an outstanding show, very well designed thematically, encompassing almost room by room, pollution, New Zealand and Irish landscapes (though waterscapes is a more appropriate term in this case) and figures.
Pollution has been broached by several contemporary artists, including Ian McKeever and the late Helen Chadwick. As is the pattern with all of Cooke's habitual themes, he approaches it in two ways, via pure naturalistic observation or schematically, in terms of a symbolic visual language. Paradoxically, the pollution pictures are beautiful. The first image you see is the dark, turbulent Black Fungus. It, and the images based on the sewage fungus and potato blight, should be ugly, but they are not. From there on, we're treated to a very big new oil of Lough Arrow and other Irish locations before finding ourselves in New Zealand, its vastness evoked in the big Road to Karamea, with mountains towering over lush forest, and wide open spaces with brilliant blue lakes and light.
The figurative work is unequivocally fleshy and erotic. It concludes with the allegorical coupling of Double Knot II, which is dated, remarkably "1987-89-99".
The Wayne Thiebaud show at NUI Galway is compact and well chosen to provide a concise survey of the range of his output. It more than backs up his assertion that he is a Realist painter and not a Pop Artist. At the beginning of the 1960s he was a Realist painter who happened to hit on Pop Art subject matter: pie counter displays of confectionery, rendered in luscious off-whites, vanillas and pinks. He went on to make work inspired by the striking topography of San Francisco, and has continued to make straightforward figure studies - although, strikingly, a study of a body on a hospital trolley unsettlingly recalls the format of the delicatessen counters. The most recent works are highly formalised, intensely coloured landscapes, displaying his habitual interest in playing off the flatness of the picture surface with the depth of the subject.
The Logan Gallery is small, but proves a fine venue for five of Paul Mosse's extraordinary mixed media painting constructions. Each of these works is a world in itself, built according to apparently arbitrary but strictly defined rules. Surfaces are demolished piecemeal and their remains recycled into the finished work. River of clear resin cut through valleys of lumpy pigment and woody debris. You have to examine the surfaces intently, and doing so is like viewing a complex landscape while skimming across it in a low-flying aircraft.
Something funny happens in the course of IAT's video Touchy - something, that is, apart from the intended humour of the work. IAT or International Art Terrorism, are Denis Cleary and Anne Connolly, and their video is a record of transgressions committed in several museums and galleries in New York and some European cities. While one of them, suitably disguised, sets about breaking the rules, by touching the artwork, getting too close to it or trying to photograph it with flash and tripod, the other records events with a concealed video camera. The results, we are told, broaches issues of "power, institution and freedom".
However, at some stage during the screening you may find your allegiances shifting from the artists to their immediate adversaries. This is because IAT do not take on the faceless bureaucrats who wield institutional power, or real embodiments of it like, say, Nick Serota, but the poor saps whose job it is to enforce the rules. Moreover, these people are revealed to be, on the whole, indulgent, tactful and patient way beyond the call of duty, and it seems just cruel, in a very Noel Edmonds kind of way, to bring such evident stress into their lives. As Cleary, dressed quite like the bowler-hatted Alex in Kubrick's A Clockwork Or- ange, ignores mild-mannered requests not to set up his tripod for the umpteenth time I found myself thinking: "Just throw the droog out on his ear." And the best moment comes when one particularly astute attendant cops onto Connolly's hidden camera and snaps at her to switch it off, now, in very NYPD tones. She had the right idea, as it happens, because, stretched to an hour or so, the game goes on far too long.
Jay Murphy is generously represented at the Spanish Parade Gallery. She shows landscapes, home and abroad, plus images inspired by the Italian Circus that visited Galway last year. The landscape work is easy-going and good-natured - it's agreeable but undemanding. The circus pictures, atmospheric evocations of the magical world of the big top, are an interesting departure, although some of them look a little rushed.
Tom Kenny of the Kenny Gallery recounts how, one evening, he was confronted by Anne Quilty who told him: "My husband is a great painter, Mr Kenny, and sadly you don't know it because you have never really seen his paintings." He correctly interpreted this as an invitation to rectify the lapse as soon as possible, and he did, visiting the artist, Tom Quilty, at home in Doorus. In fact, it seems fair to say that Tom Kenny's interest in showing his work gave Quilty a new lease of life as a painter.
While he has been described as a naive artist he wasn't really naive at all. He aimed for a spontaneous simplicity in his pictures but he was technically very capable indeed and well aware of the subtleties of painterly style. Born in Limerick in 1914, he later emigrated to England where he knew and painted with Gerard Dillon. It seems that financial responsibilities thwarted his desire to paint full-time but, eventually, when he moved back to Ireland in 1978, he was able to do just that, and happily he enjoyed 17 productive years before his death in 1995. For the most part, he records the Burren landscape and life within it with affectionate good humour. He made no great claims for his work, and at times relaxed into an easy, formulaic picturesqueness, but overall it amounts to a valuable, life-enhancing account of his environment, with some really outstanding individual pictures. This show is a very enjoyable, if slightly over-crowded, tribute.
Other festival shows worth seeing are Chairs at the Aula Maxima, NUI Galway, open from tomorrow; paintings by Judy Silke and Val Byrne at An Damhlann Gallery, Spiddal; contemporary glass art at the Art Euro Gallery, Bridge Mills, open from Saturday; a group show of the five Akin artists, based in Galway's peripheries at the Columban Hall, Sea Road; at the same venue there's work by the Seattle organisation Women Painters of Washington; and Linda Keohane and Janet Vinelli at the Hawthorn Gallery.
