Magnetic north exercises a subtle kind of pulling power

VISUAL ARTS/Aidan DunneArtist Mark Joyce has turned curator for The Idea of North at the Green on Red. The theme makes sense in the context of his own work, which has always been sensitive to the issue of geographical and cultural placement. Witness his exploration of what might be termed a midlands' sensibility in his last solo photographic show. Now he has selected four artists whose work, he proposes, can be viewed in the light of the notion of north as "a direction, a place and a cultural condition. Some might even say it

Canadian pianist Glenn Gould liked the idea so much he made it the subject of a strange radio discussion programme in the late 1960s. At the end of Bob Rafelson's film Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson sits shivering and jacketless in the cab of a truck heading north in a bleak wintry landscape, in search of some emotional distance.

Joyce's artists connect with these or comparable ideas in various ways. John Schabel's black and white photographs depict passengers glimpsed through plane windows. Joyce links these strangely poignant, slightly anxious portraits to the busy North Atlantic air corridors where, high above the Arctic, so many individuals sit in transit, isolated in their own personal worlds. Schabel also shows two eerily beautiful photographs of spectacular cloudscapes, presumably taken from a plane window.

David Deutsch's photographs and paintings offer us night-time views of Los Angeles as illuminated by the cold beam of an eye in the sky. These blank, uninhabited spaces, in which the city is rendered unfamiliar and alien, inescapably suggest the searchlight of a police helicopter. With German-based Norwegian Olav Christoper Jenssen we have a late exponent of the Northern Romantic Tradition discerned by Rosenblum.

Jenssen's cool, fragmentary images, painted with great aplomb, utilise a lively palette and suggest a heterogeneous world of unpredictable interconnections. They recall the spirit of contemporary Scandinavian jazz.

Even more strikingly, London-based German Mariele Neudecker connects with the German romanticism of Casper David Freidrich. Her startling miniature sculptures in glass tanks evoke his transcendental mountain-top landscapes, while nature is reflected in the eye of the beholder in her video piece. Perhaps she revisits Romanticism not to praise it but to try and recover from it the possibility of nature freed from the captivity of ideology.

Richard Gorman's homerun at the Kerlin may signal a change of direction, or perhaps a reversal of direction, in the sense that it seems to halt at least one overriding trend of his work over the past few years. That trend consisted of the progressive simplification of colour and form, culminating in the epic concision of his Nine Paintings. His new work is certainly pared down and disciplined in both form and content, but it is relatively informal.

It also amplifies something that has been a feature of his painting all along, which is an asymmetrical, disruptive element that thwarts the work's apparent tendency towards minimal, all-over forms. There is always something that throws things off-centre or subverts any notion of formal purity.

Appropriately, there is an almost playful, free-floating quality to much of the work in this show. Many of the paintings contain motifs and devices that hint at processes and images in the wider contemporary cultural environment.

In tandem with her outstanding retrospective at the RHA, Barbara Warren is showing a number of works on paper at the Taylor Gallery under the general title Studies from Ireland and Spain. Spanning the 1950s to the 1990s, they include figure studies but are for the most part landscapes. Drawing has always been a strongpoint with her, and in a way the figure drawings most clearly encapsulate her pictorial approach in the way they take a geometricised, analytical approach to organic form, but in a tactful, understated way. There are a number of real gems among her studies from Connemara and Spain, particularly when her liking for almost architectonic structure blends naturally with the landscape subject.