Object lessons

Visual Arts: Aidan Dunne reveis four exhibitions around Dublin for  The Irish Times.

Nathalie du Pasquier, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until September 27th (01-6708055)

Jennifer Trouton: Looking At The Overlooked, Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until September 17th (01-6617286)

Bernie Masterson: An Engagement With Nature, Hallward Gallery, Dublin, until September 20th (01-6621482)

John Graham: Reconfigure, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, until October 4th (01-6713414)

Nathalie du Pasquier paints still life subjects in a very particular, personal style. Her pictures have a bright, attractive clarity. Warm light envelopes careful arrangements of everyday objects, such as bottles, cups, glasses, boxes, books and even a gas cylinder. Previously, though not so much now, the paintings featured studio tools and equipment. As a rule everything is inanimate. In one composition in the current show, however, a human hand, perhaps the artist's, intrudes into the frame.

Intrudes is an apposite word, because with du Pasquier, as with the great Italian still life painter Giorgio Morandi, you feel that individually and collectively the paintings do not so much describe fragments of the world as form worlds of their own. In viewing them you enter an instantly recognisable, self-contained imaginative space.

Again like Morandi, du Pasquier excludes a great deal from her space. She frames her compositions tightly, so we seem to be very close to the objects. They have a super-real presence because of the generosity of the light, the way they are simplified and stylised, and because they are for the most part larger than life size. Ordinary things gain something of the allure of bright toys even though, it should be said, du Pasquier doesn't go in for flinging bright colours around: she is quite sparing in her use of colour and seems to enjoy exploring grey and earth hues.

She also evidently enjoys the way light transforms things, generating complex patterns and planes through transparency, reflection and luminosity.

Starting from a deceptive simplicity, her pictures engage the eye through their creation of networks of spaces and surfaces or, you could say, emptiness and fullness, apart altogether from the pleasurable associations they more obviously inspire. They are, as well, full of references to experiences and activities despite their preference for the inanimate.

They sustain our engagement not so much because they are overtly attractive, which they are, but because they work so effectively on several levels.

Jennifer Trouton's Looking At The Overlooked is a fantastic piece of installation well worth seeing as an installation per se. Arranged on a wall of the gallery in a grid are some 300 small square panels. Each is a detailed image, some painted, some photographic, some apparently hybrids, all worked so they exhibit some textural nuance, even the slightest touch that indicates the artist's intervention.

Trouton's subject, as her title suggests, is life's workaday background detail. Corners of rooms, doorways, items of clothing, domestic implements, typewriters, teapots: all are typical motifs. Within the overall grid are repetitions with variations.

The images draw you in, and as you work your way along you get a sense of an atmosphere relating to time past, life lived, even to dereliction and decay. As particular images recur as echoes, and because of the painstaking quality of the piece, there is a feeling of life as a pattern of repetitious rituals and routines.

Bernie Masterson's An Engagement With Nature comes as something of a surprise. It is a series of landscapes by an artist previously associated with figure compositions, sensitive narrative works with a tentative, exploratory quality.

The landscapes follow a consistent, straightforward pattern, typically featuring mountainous terrain treated in terms of foreground, distance and sky, all broadly brushed.

They are envisaged not as accounts of particular places at specific moments but as imaginative statements of internalised experiences of landscape: emotion recollected in tranquillity.

But it is as if Masterson has not quite formulated the pictorial means to deal with all this. The paintings have a brusque, generalised air and are close to being formulaic. Only occasionally does she get involved in more complex passages of colour and texture and offer hints of what might have been.

Otherwise it's business as usual; that is, paintings delivered in a loose, curiously offhand manner. It could be that she is at an early stage of her involvement with landscape, but this exhibition is a disappointment from an artist who has in the past shown herself to be more subtle and capable.

John Graham's etchings and prints in Reconfigure are extremely accomplished. In a series of larger carborundums, cages of thick black line - there's nothing more deeply black than printer's ink - make clustered, scaffold-like forms. It is as if the artist is struggling to articulate an inner space or perhaps to describe a volume, even a head or figure, by means of this scaffolding of line.

Each attempt ends in failure, which is not to say the print is a failure. Rather it's about the process of trying, about why it cannot be done.

The etchings use similar linear devices but take the process one step farther in their split format. Each one presents two alternative takes, so to speak. They are comparable but don't quite match up, don't make a coherent whole. In this they echo the failure to define a form that characterises the carborundum prints. Graham doesn't try to resolve the problem; he explores and even relishes the contradictions and limitations. His work is elegant and interesting.