Reviewed:

Bardo by Lynne Foster Fitzgerald, Garter Lane Arts Centre until March 31st

Rain on Water, by Eamon Colman, The Rubicon Gallery until April 8th

The First Show, The Lemonsreet Gallery, Lemon Street, until April 12th

Lynne Foster Fitzgerald has intriguingly titled her exhibition at the Garter Lane Arts Centre Bardo, which reads as a cross between Bardot and Garbo but means, she informs us, something else entirely. It has nothing to do with reclusive glamour and is in fact a Tibetan term signifying "a transition or gap between the completion of one situation and the onset of another".

The Bardo paintings make up one of four series that in the overall show, but their spirit seems to pervade all the work. By situating herself, and by extension us, the viewers, in this indeterminate space, Foster Fitzgerald arguably avoids being pinned down in terms of imagery or intentions and, more, can explore the idea of a fruitful uncertainty.

Her paintings continually replay notions of internalisation and quest. In an ambiguous, understated way, she proposes a number of symbolically charged images, including a horned head, a tunnel or passageway and an opening, a heart, a book, text, flesh. There may be hints of mythic archetypes here, particularly the account of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, but Foster Fitzgerald is more tapping into the associations than providing a thematic treatment.

The enduring appeal of such mythic frameworks is by no means confined to the traditional fine arts. It underlines even computer games like Tomb Raider. Foster Fitzgerald's interest is centred on the process of painting as a means of personal exploration, a way of addressing and articulating areas of experience and emotion that might otherwise elude expression (in a way that suggests an affinity with the work of Anita Groener). So the external world is largely internalised. In fact, the world in her work is usually a dark-lit, subterranean realm. Space, light and colour are not so much pictorial components in a conventional sense. They amount to the emotionally charged essence of the work.

Whether coincidentally or not, she is apparently more relaxed in some of the Bardo paintings, including Bardo 3, dominated by red and dark earths, and the blue choppy rhythms of Bardo 5, which are particularly good. Bardo 2 strikingly equates the skin of the painting with torn human skin. When she runs into problems, as she occasionally does, they may well relate to the difficulty of painting with gestural freedom while preserving a set motif.

Many painters say that you have to be prepared to throw it all away at every stage of the painting: if you start trying to save nice parts of a picture you're sunk. For the most part, Foster Fitzgerald has the requisite ruthlessness to take a chance, and it pays off.

Eamon Colman's Rain on Water at the Rubicon Gallery features his best and most relaxed work to date. It was inspired by a solitary sojourn on a tiny island of the north coast of Denmark. In such circumstances, your relationship with the weather assumes a centrality unimaginable in the comfort of a modern city - though very real indeed on Ireland's western seaboard and coastal regions generally - and an attractive, bright airiness is the dominant factor in these paintings.

Colman renders things in a simplified, pictorial vocabulary of line, pattern and blocks of colour. Aspects of the work recall the clever theatricality of some of David Hockney's landscapes, as though the various pictorial elements have been stylised as a series of two-dimensional props and rearranged at will in the theatre of the imagination. There is a playful element to this, but one that trivialises neither the paintings nor the subject matter.

Several new galleries have opened in Dublin within the past couple of years, and now there is another, the Lemonstreet Gallery in, naturally, Lemon Street, just off Grafton Street. But Lemonstreet is not just new in terms of its arrival on the scene; it is exclusively devoted to graphic art, and it is unusual in that it's an example of someone literally going back to the drawing board to rethink the way a gallery works.

The someone is Michael O'Reilly, whose background is in law and financial services. He is also "a modest collector of contemporary art" and on the board of the National Gallery. He worked closely with architects Paschal and Elaine Mahony, who tackled the gallery's space limitations by developing an ingenious system of overlapping sliding panels recessed into the walls. The gallery also exists as a website, www.lemonstreet.com

The first show is given over to the work of seven international artists, produced at the studios of Pratt Contemporary Art. They include sculptor, painter and printmaker Ana Maria Pacheco, whose exhibition was the highlight of last year's Kilkenny Arts Week. The Finnish artist Kristian Krofors is also particularly striking, but all the work is to a very high standard. Lemonstreet will also show work by Irish artists (there is some on view even now in the smaller downstairs space), though, in relation to international names, it worth pointing out that one of the great attractions of prints is their affordability. Where a painting or sculpture by a high-profile artist may be prohibitively expensive, a print can be surprisingly reasonable.

Writing about Ascend last week, I inadvertently credited Oran Day's photographs of Mark Garry to Sinead Burt Odea. Apologies to both artists for the mix-up.