Eamon Coleman

A RETREAT to a studio at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Co Mayo seems to have provided both the opportunity and the motive for Eamon Coleman's latest body of semi abstract, maritime images. The show is dedicated to the painter Arthur Armstrong who, among other things, worked up craggy images of the rockscape of the West. Like Armstrong, Coleman has sliced up the land scape until the surface becomes a stepping stone path across cavernous darkness below.

The undersea world, possibly seen from above, is the central motif of the show. In Digging For Pearls, the painting that gives the show its title, Coleman stakes out his territory in a tidal ooze of golden pigment across which some sparse ripples advance.

But even though the painter carefully stacks and balances - the smooth figures of his picture, like somebody building up a dry stone wall, he is at the next turn prepared to kick the whole artifice over as he disrupts the teetering couture by paring away a section of the image to reveal an alternative pictorial reality below.

Similar rectangular passages transgress the organic tone of several images here, although seldom to such powerful effect as in Digging For Pearls. Surprisingly for a set of pictures about and inspired by the sea, the images lack the pictorial equivalent of salt. All the ingredients are present, but despite some energetic painting, Coleman's brand of communication feels the lack of any intense imperatives or querulous interrogatives.