Lonely landscapes

Sean McSweeney's exhibition at the Taylor Galleries finds him in a restless mood. The title, Bogland and Shoreline Sligo, signals his continued engagement with the local landscape that has absorbed him for many years now.

Bogland and Shoreline Sligo Sean McSweeney

Taylor Galleries until tomorrow (01-676605)5

Open Ground Niall Wright

Hallward Gallery until October 31st

(01- 6621482)

The Floating World Gary Coyle

Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until November 2nd (01-8740064)

Simon English paintings

Cross Gallery until October 27th (01-4738978)

When I'm 64 Gerald Davis

Davis Gallery until October 31st (01-8726969)

The work itself is admirably varied in approach. In a number of pieces, including the fine Ochre Field, for example, he scrapes away the relatively thick, fluent coating of paint that is characteristic of his accustomed style. It is as if he were expressing a distrust of facility or slickness, pushing the picture into more difficult, problematic areas.

Elsewhere, you might think he has taken a long hard look at an unlikely exemplar, the German painter Gerhard Richter.

The remarkable Morning Shoreline is composed entirely of pigment dragged horizontally. It has to be said that this method of painting follows on consistently from his prior work, and it is entirely possible he hasn't looked at a single picture by Richter. But either way, it is a terrific, expertly made painting that does him credit.

His formal language is built from a few simple elements, almost all relating purely to horizontal and vertical accents and divisions. Such is the atmospheric range and richness of his work that this formal underpinning rarely feels as stringent and closely argued as it might sound - and, indeed, as it surely is. The exhibition contains a number of works that could be described as classic McSweeney, but also works that push towards relative abstraction - without ever severing the link with landscape - and many of these, particularly on a smaller scale, are outstanding.

Niall Wright has long specialised in naturalistic descriptions of windswept upland landscapes, particularly the "heather desert" of the Wicklow Mountains, and his paintings in Open Ground: Paintings from a Wicklow Bog continue his exploration of this terrain. Over time he has grown more responsive to seasonal changes and nuances of colour, and he provides good, unsentimental accounts of a magnificent if fairly desolate environment.

It could be said that one of his pictures is much like another. That is true to an extent, but there is a great deal of subtle variation from work to work, and he is right to exclude anything that distracts from the elemental landscape that interests him. All the same, I did wish that his exhibition was more than a succession of similar, isolated images of identical format, partly because that format is a square, which goes against the nature of the subject matter. There is no clearer demonstration of this than the three fine paintings of landscape format included in the show.

Gary Coyle's The Floating World fractures naturally along a line between the photographs and the drawings that make it up. The title actually refers specifically to the photographs, which are night views of anonymous urban spaces, "unpeople" as such but with various hints of human activity and occupation at a distance. The title's reference to the Japanese term for a culture based on the pursuit of transient pleasures is ironic in the context of these empty, lonely spaces.

While the photographs are perfectly okay, it is also the case that there seems to be a lot of these kind of photographic images floating, so to speak, around, that they are becoming something close to a cliché. Another kind of emptiness or absence is explored in the drawings, collectively titled Porn Scenes. Which is what they are, porn settings with the performers excised. Perhaps these empty interior spaces correspond to the empty exterior spaces of the photographs as sites of ephemeral or illusory pleasure, but, as intricately, even lovingly worked drawings, they have a richer, denser presence, as if the desire bound up in the act and apprehension of what is no longer there is displaced on to the forms, patterns and textures of the settings. They are beautifully made, enigmatic works and they confirm that Coyle is a consistently interesting artist.

Simon English, at the Cross Gallery, is known for two kinds of subject: featureless landscapes glimpsed in transit and empty vitrines. This show develops both of these ideas with spare, rigorous studies of generic contemporary settings and objects: the modular hotel typically built close to airports and the furniture and appliances that form the standard fittings within, including fridge, bed, armchairs and, emblematic of a world of order and uniformity, the filing cabinet.

English renders these things as flattened, isolated motifs in a painterly manner that recalls aspects of the work of Charles Brady. There is a composition which consists of a horizontal division, for example, and an electrical socket.

With such limited means, a lot depends on subtle inflections of colour, tone and touch, and in this respect English is pretty convincing. The obvious implication is that he is bemoaning the sameness and anonymity of much modern life, but the air of subdued melancholy in his work suggests something more complex and ambiguous than that.

GERALD Davis is marking his 64th birthday with a solo show at his gallery. A romantic in the Yeatsean (Jack B.) vein, he delivers each picture with a theatrical flourish.

Although landscape is a constant subject, and he is capable of making strong, atmospheric small-scale studies of place, he, like Yeats, likes to dramatise the landscape through narrative and the human presence. That presence usually takes the form of a broadly indicated, centrally positioned figure. For Davis, the painting is akin to an improvisational performance. You go for it each time in an all-or-nothing effort. While on occasion the titles and the subjects verge on sentimentality, in the actual delivery he steers clear, holding, like Yeats, to a certain aloofness and detachment.