Facing up to familiar scenes

Reviewed
Homeland, Paul Winstanley, Kerlin Gallery until Apr 23 (01-6709093)
Slow Time - Donegal, Bernadette Kiely, Taylor Galleries (01-6766055)
Plan D, Rubicon Gallery until Apr 23 (01-6708055)

There are just a handful of paintings in Paul Winstanley's exhibition Homeland at the Kerlin Gallery, and even then, images are virtually repeated from work to work. Walkway 1 and Walkway 2, for example, offer us almost identical views of an anonymous, deserted corridor by night. Both are close to monochromatic renderings of an enclosed, glass-walled space illuminated by harsh white strip lights. The location could be a hospital or indeed any other kind of institutional or corporate space. It's curiously neutral, neither friendly nor particularly threatening.

Chances are it's also recognisable, that any viewer will recall negotiating just such a corridor. The interchangeability of the scenes adds to the feeling that these are standardised aspects of the contemporary urban environment, something that is in keeping with Winstanley's long-term exploration of deserted, communal, functional spaces in his back-catalogue of strikingly consistent, meticulously made, photographically inflected work.

In Homeland, the idea of a generic urban enclosure is set against the pastoral, in the form of two views of birch trees in apparently idyllic rural settings. Yet a similar blankness attends what might have been more sympathetic spaces. With schematic neatness, the third strand implies a synthesis of the other two. Little Finland foregrounds a stand of birches and, in the background, affords us a glimpse of a modernist block. The vertical accents of the pale-barked birch trunks emphasise rather than work against the right-angled grid of the buildings.

The closer you look, the more ironic seems the show's title. Concepts of difference, uniqueness, specialness wrapped up in the term "homeland" are contradicted by the geographical vagueness of what we see. The studied neutrality of Winstanley's technique adds to the effect. He endeavours to render technique invisible, and he succeeds. Yet one can see that considerable elegance and skill have gone into making the spare surfaces of his works. To say that his manner of painting takes its cue from Gerhard Richter's treatment of the photographic image is no disparagement. It's more a question of facing up to the pervasiveness of photographic imagery, which Richter managed more effectively and more critically than artists who are generally described as photo-realists.

In Slow Time - Donegal at the Taylor Gallery, Bernadette Kiely approaches the problem of making a representational image from a non-photographic angle. Previously, in a series of paintings based on an awareness of time passing in the north Mayo landscape, she subordinated the image to an intense responsiveness to details of sensory experience: the dazzling whiteness of bog cotton, the lemon yellow of gorse, the sheer expanse of bogland, and so on. It was as if representation was distilled into the essences of things, and linked to an awareness of our temporal exposure to them and the idea of fugitive time, the sense of the world continually flaring, fading and receding.

Some of this work is included in her current show. The surprising thing about her most recent work, for which she moved further north, to Donegal, is that it is more representational. A number of quite substantial paintings offer recognisable views, including such stubbornly iconic ones as Mount Errigal and The Poisoned Glen. To take on such subjects is to take on people's preconceptions of how they should appear, how they appear in an established scenic iconography.

Errigal is a quartzite cone, volcanic in appearance. Sunlight, reflected from the scree of shattered stone that girdles its slopes, can look like snow. All of which leads the aspiring painter into cliched terrain. It is as if Kiely decided the best way to avoid cliche was to stick to the evidence of her own senses. So that, in more than one painting, Errigal appears as an exotic alpine presence in Donegal, just as it can when encountered in the flesh.

Yet she does not succumb to the risk of recreating received images. Two factors come into play here. One is her attentiveness to the restless light resulting from the weather tumbling in from the Atlantic. The drama that heightens with altitude in the paintings points our attention towards the skies and, again, reflects on the fleeting nature of our experience of things. The other major factor is her continuity of style. Rather than switching to a consciously representational mode, she sets about letting representation emerge from the same process-orientated, textural technique more conspicuously evident in the Mayo paintings. The result is a series of bold, vivid works.

The D in Plan D at the Rubicon Gallery stands for drawing, which is currently going through something of a revival or reassessment. There's the two-part From Landscape at the Mermaid, for example, and the National Gallery is devoting the month of May to a series of drawing-related courses and events.

Drawing's centrality to artistic practice diminished from the early 1970s with the restructuring of art college courses and the transformation of traditional art categories. Yet it hasn't simply faded away, despite being displaced by various kinds of photographic and computer technology. Rather what's happened is that we've been encouraged to consider drawing in a wider context, and that is one of the things Plan D does.

It features work by five artists, Andrew Bick, Diana Cooper, Patrick M Fitzgerald, Thomas Nozkowski and Serman Sam. All work within the area of abstraction and all are painters. In his introduction to the show, Sam outlines a very persuasive argument of the function of drawing in the context of abstraction. For him, like abstract painting, it allows a reflective, exploratory response to the world outside the specificity of the representational image. He makes a great case for the potential of that "in-between" area as a space of possibility, a space infused with desire. His own work is a good illustration of this, with its dreamy elaborations of layered networks and systems.