SINCE quite rightly and inevitably, the spotlights of publicity have hovered over the big retrospective exhibition at IMMA, this exhibition has been in some danger of being not only overshadowed, but virtually overlooked. And it would be a pity, because it shows a number of le Brocquy's most recent paintings and also, of course, because this is the Taylor Galleries' new site. It is a ground floor gallery, less varied in terms of exhibition areas than the previous gallery down the street but with better spaces for showing large pictures.

Le Brocquy calls the exhibition Human Images, which presumably relates to his virtual obsession with "presences" which come somewhere between the psychic and the physical, or include areas of both, but are grasped as much by intuition as by sight or hearing. His prolonged Head series was no doubt part of this theme, or search, hut in the present series the physical presence is narrowed down further to a single orifice - an eye, an ear, a mouth (which also suggests a vaginal slit), or in certain pictures, the pelvic button with a suggestion of pudenda just below. There are a few cases in which a head (in profile) emerges faintly behind the ear, and hair is suggestively outlined; and in Lescartes there appears to be skull and perhaps even ghostly hints of a winding sheet.

As with the more familiar Heads, the images are placed full centre, while the space around them is virtually abstract. However, instead of the rather neutral, greyish "grounds" we have become used to, the paint is handled in a slightly flecked, almost pointillist manner. This means that these surrounding areas are alive in their own right and "work" as something more than empty space.

These paintings have a strong, hypnotic, slightly macabre presence and, though Francis Bacon will probably be brought up again, the treatment is quite unBaconian - cool in tone and smoothly, elegantly, almost impersonally painted with no obvious effects of brushwork. The emotional temperature, too, is very different from his.

Though the orifices themselves are small, by their look of fixity they create an aura of unease and mystery, and there is a sense of overall surface tension in the way in which they hold the whole picture plane taut like a stretched skin. Le Brocquy, inside the past two decades, has hardly painted better than this.