Michael Farrell

MICHAEL Farrell's previous show at the Taylor included seven versions of La Rencontre, Cafe de Flore, an illustration of a literary anecdote set at the same Parisian location. This new show, more than two years later, also includes several versions of this "meeting with remarkable men" in which Pablo Picasso entertains James Joyce with some tricks with matchbooks.

Farrell's return to this familiar scene does not, however, turn up any further explanation as to why the artist finds this story so engaging. One of the artist's signature Irish wolf hounds now occasionally embellishes the canvas, and there is some reworking of the picture's space, but besides these minor alterations, these paintings remain gnawingly repetitious.

A new "rencontre" also crops up. Joyce, this time surrounded by modernist sculpture rather than match sticks, is in the company of someone who may be Constantin Brancusi. The men sit in stilly isolation it does not look like the conversation is going well in a room which Farrell splices into edgy cubist space. This motif appears several times in the show, in versions from a spectral, grisaille version, to a loose, defaced charcoal sketch. On no occasion, however, does a new strategy result in an energetic composition.

Perhaps the most interesting image is created when Farrell briefly sets aside his literary interests and his tendency to produce caricatures and cartoons to create the wiry grid of a bare vineyard that forms the foreground of his frosty Snowscape, Cardet.

Also on show are a couple of small sculptures that appear to be related to the artist's contentious L'eveque series (which featured a bishop with a nude woman). When versions of these images first appeared, they already seemed to relate to a time long ago, a time when the idea of a bishop being fellated was an attack of belief and faith, rather than a juicy scandal. Now, however, Farrell's work on this theme has taken on the appearance of little more than a saucy antique.