Micky Donnelly

TO BE quite frank, this exhibition somehow seems a little short of the calibre expected of this very distinguished public gallery; or perhaps it is simply unsuited to it. In a private gallery, it would probably look perfectly adequate but, cumulatively, it does not have either the weight of content or the sustained interest to fill the larger and more demanding spaces of the Butler.

Grouped under the title The Reflex Series, these 23 works - on canvas and paper - look repetitive in their ideas and rather lacking in "body".

Donnelly, usually an emphatic and even hard hitting artist, has softened his style noticeably, but any gain in subtlety or refinement is off set by the nebulous imagery and curiously indecisive farms.

What imagery there is grouped around the centre of the pictures, but it amounts to little more than a few generalised "marks", vaguely anthropomorphic, of the kind of which Louis le Bracquy might have made something positive. In fact, they are as much "stains" as marks, faintly calling to mind what Helen Frankenthaler and certain others were doing 30 years ago.

Other marks or shapes, equally faint and sometimes even fainter, hover about the picture planes, suggesting pictorial depth yet not quite achieving it.

Possibly as a device to hold things together, Donnelly often employs a kind of grid format, sometimes dividing his works into geometrical areas and sometimes merely using faint parallel lines in the manner of Agnes Martin.

It seems halfhearted and slightly unformulated, however. Donnelly has done much more realised and convincing painting in the past.