Finding some space among the trees

Visual Arts: Aidan Dunne reviews Eider on Candy by Sonia Shiel at the Cross Gallery, Nocturnal by Mary McIntyre at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery and William Crozier at the Taylor Gallerie, also Crossings by Michael Kiernan at the Ashford Gallery.

To describe Sonia Shiel's paintings at the Cross Gallery, risks selling them short. The words that most obviously apply to them - subtle, muted, understated, textural, oblique - tend to make them sound dull and uninteresting. They are subtle and oblique, but they are also informed by the artist's exceptional attention to process, a self-critical watchfulness of her own judgments, and the result is a body of work that is extremely, though quietly, rich and vital.

Fruit Tree I is one of the best. It typifies the give and take involved in Shiel's way of working, its restless surface revealing layers of addition and subtraction. We can make out a visual reference to the fruit tree of the title, but it is in a way a minor presence in a painting dominated by textural expanses, from the mauve-grey gloss that covers the top half of the composition to the residual traces of lush pinky-red that show through in the lower half.

Shiel uses these contrasting textures, what might be termed the hard gloss shell and the soft inner tissue, very effectively. For one thing, the juxtaposition is spatially ambiguous, prompting us to constantly reassess the relationships between subject and ground, positive and negative. References to landscape come through in various ways, and it is as if there are two parallel strands running through the work, one a consideration of the landscape, the other relating to the process of painting.

Yet there are common concerns: the seductiveness of the landscape is tempered by cruelty and toughness, it imposes its own hard constraints and frames histories of difficulty and loss, and in a way the same holds true for painting. The innate seductiveness of the medium is checked by a distrust of glib, easy effects. Rather Shiel tries to negotiate another position for herself, a pictorial space that is equal to the complexities and paradoxes of experience.

In what is her most accomplished work to date, she does so quite successfully. There are various other subtleties involved, such as her use of stitching, collage, irregular formats and tiny, throwaway marks that suggest fragility and endurance. Then, in the final room of the show, she surprises us with two unambiguously figurative compositions, ambitious paintings in which she takes risks that pay off handsomely.

Mary McIntyre's Nocturnal at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, consists of a series of large photographic prints of deserted urban landscapes by night. They are deserted, but they are illuminated by electric light and charged with a slight unease, not least because of the deep, black shadows that lie at the fringes of open spaces. There is also an eerie stillness to the scenes which mostly feature parks or other areas of municipal planting, plus a suburban patio and a railway.

With their high level of detail and their dramatic lighting, the images look real to the point of unreality, like carefully contrived settings. McIntyre has in mind the atmosphere of paintings by Jacob van Ruisdal and Casper David Friedrich, and there is certainly something of the heightened, theatrical quality of their work in her photographs. It is difficult not to see them in terms of film imagery as well however, particularly in the way her concentration on vacated urban spaces seems to draw our attention to what we do not see, on what might be there.

There is a theatrical feeling to the work of William Crozier at the Taylor Galleries as well. Crozier is renowned for his boldly colourful treatment of the west Cork landscape. Expanses of land, sea and vegetation are foreshortened and stylised in tersely stated compositions often featuring dramatic contrasts between dark tones and luminous areas of colour. It's a simplified schema that recalls the structure of a stage design.

Oddly enough, while it's easy and indeed accurate to think of Crozier as a very good colourist, adept at juggling volatile combinations and making something zingy but harmonious of them, it's become clear that he is also a very good graphic artist, an eloquent manager of black and white.

And perhaps the highlight of this show is a suite of drawings, some of which exploit the rich dense black of lithographic crayon. These drawings use the same spare vocabulary as the paintings, with just a greater emphasis on texture, and the strange thing is that colour seems somehow implicit, locked up in the images.

Michael Kiernan's Crossings at the Ashford Gallery refers to crossing "borders, frontiers" in geographical social senses. He is a representational painter whose style could be termed picaresque. His big, rambling narrative paintings are crammed with incident, figures, patterns, pastiche, quotations - in fact there are lots of words. There is a sense that he is setting out to convey, as he says himself, "the human comedy". While he is technically a very able artist, and the layering and overlapping of words and images is engaging enough, the paintings don't quite cohere or convince. It could be argued they are not supposed to cohere, but their discursiveness comes across more as self-indulgence than witty improvisation. The American artist Larry Rivers's history paintings from several decades back come to mind in relation to what Kiernan is trying to do, but they are in a different class entirely.