Divergent points of focus

TOGETHER with galleries in Germany, France and England, Dublin's Green On Red Gallery has organised a grabbag exhibition of work…

TOGETHER with galleries in Germany, France and England, Dublin's Green On Red Gallery has organised a grabbag exhibition of work from the 1990s by a range of European photographers.

While the exhibition is not large, despite spanning both of the Green On Red's premises (in Fitzwilliam Square and Lombard Street), it does manage to pull in an intriguingly divergent group of styles and interests, taking in everything from John Cronin's abstract photochemical mark making to JeanLuc Moulene's mammoth, super real female nude, La Beaute Debout.

Ireland is represented by Clare Langan, last seen at the Gallery of Photography, and Alex Walsh. The latter's Morgue series might possibly be a homage to that other great photographer of the body warehouse, Andreas Serano. However, while the naughty American offers gory gashes and grisly glimpses, Walsh's frames feel more like dissection waiting to happen. In these photographs, a plughole always looks ready to receive blood, even if it presently appears clean and utilitarian.

Clare Langan shows a triptych entitled Clouds, depicting smears of landscape swiped across a black field, which might easily have appeared in her occasionally rewarding Gallery of Photography show.

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Germany is represented by the playfully poppy, but deceptively bleak, work of Hans Hemmert. The bubbly, yellow latex covered scenes he depicts could have been created digitally with the right Photoshop plugin. The indications are, however, that these pictures, which feature the artist Im Atelier, and in a car, represent moments from some version of "real" life.

Catherine Yass's light boxes display the photographer's taste for hyper saturated colours in images which push the everyday towards some electronic other world. The two images here, Stage, show the innards of the proscenium, its grid of rigging glowing with the light of unnatural, unearthly greens and blues - suggesting, hardly accidentally, the surface of a printed circuit.

Paul Graham shows a number of photographs featuring Japanese subject matter, ranging from a casual snap of girl in a Tokyo bar to a photograph of a photograph of the massed ranks of the Imperial Guard. He finds his strongest image in the sternly framed pristine twists and wires of a new car engine. As yet unsoiled by use, Graham's motor, unlike his human sitters, seems to have the straining energy of an emerging life form.