On moral camouflage for crime

It doesn't take much to realise the kind of person who kills people for money is the kind of person you'd be better off never coming across. Yet one of the more perplexing features of contemporary popular cinema is the emergence of the hit-man as hero, a phenomenon that, like the vogue for serial-killer films, is typical of our voyeuristic, ambivalent attitude to crimes of violence. There is a huge public appetite for crime in the form of books, films, magazines and newspapers. Just think of the considerable mileage the tabloids - and many broadsheets - got from the strange, horrible, sordid, mundane saga of Fred West. This insatiable appetite for salacious detail diminishes the moral distance between ordinary decent citizens and the Fred Wests of the world.

Gary Coyle's exhibition True Crime at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery ventures into this difficult territory. His drawings, of crime scenes and Killers, are generally dark and blurred, so blurred and overworked that it is often hard to orientate yourself. As details register, you realise that they are also fairly ordinary, anonymous interiors. The murkiness suggests the poor reproduction values of mass graphic reproduction, and also a moral murkiness. It's hard to tell what's going on. Coyle underlines it by including himself among the portraits of killers. Similarly, Camouflage may hint at the way some crime is morally camouflaged by virtue of claiming extra-criminal status. The scene of the crime drawings are big, and they depend on their scale for their effect. It is noticeable that in the smaller Killer drawings, Coyle doesn't have the same technical panache as, say, Marlene Dumas, but the show is effective.

THERE'S murkiness of a different kind in Mark Shields's work at the Grosvenor Gallery. In his portraits, landscapes and figure compositions he favours a dim, crepuscular light. Heads are vague presences in the shadows. It's popular stuff and it's easy to see why. The pictures are overtly attractive, with a moody, romantic appeal, and they are painted with obvious ability. And yet. In their reliance on one optical effect they seem a bit slick and formulaic, and manage to fudge the question of whether they're actually any good. His larger figure compositions amplify the portentousness of the smaller work, and when he makes studies of sea shells in brighter light the picture surfaces are disappointingly lifeless. Could it be that people respond to work like this primarily because they are reassured by its apparent display of traditional skills?

JAMES O'Connor's show, at the Taylor Gallery, with its rather grandiose title, Immanence and Transcendence, sounds portentous in prospect but in the event is not. This show surveys several years of his work on paper. He is a thoughtful, introspective artist, and his images are double distilled. Colour hardly gets a look in. Much of his efforts seem to be directed at getting rid of things, like Giacometti paring away at his figures. In fact, some of O'Connor's drawings recall Giacometti's paintings in the way they are worked over and over to produce spare, monochrome, provisional images, like sketchy plans or blueprints.

They are metaphorical, abstract works. That is, in the weight of consideration given to their formulation and substance, they are equivalent to the world: life translated directly into abstract art. The most surprising pieces are those that appear almost flippant, spontaneous and throwaway, like doodles, when O'Connor restricts himself to just a few devices: a light, rambling line, a few broader, heavier lines, and on occasion a wash of one greyish colour. These are like extracts from a diary, and they ask for a measure of trust on the part of the spectator.

Samuel Walsh, at the Rubicon Gallery, plays tricks with perception. His paintings are simple in the sense of being clear and straightforward in design and execution. Groups of abstract motifs, definite, hard-edged shapes, are arranged in orderly rows against textural, choppy backgrounds. The backgrounds swirl and flow around the shapes like water around rocks or, more appositely perhaps, like raked sand or pebbles in a Japanese garden. While the foreground shapes suggest containers of various kinds, particularly domestic objects such as vases, jars or bowls, they are not quite representational in the way they might be in Guggi's formalised still lifes. William Scott at the more abstract end of his range might be nearer the mark.

Walsh's work usually brings to mind concepts of rationality, control and precision. But the idea of chaos is as essential a component of his painterly world. While each painting enacts the organisation of chaos into manageable patterns, there is also the feeling that you can never quite keep chaos at bay - that, for example, the orderly shapes he invents have lives of their own, in the way they look as if they are useful and familiar, while they are not. So the calm poise of his work incorporates an awareness of its opposite.

Margaret O'Sullivan's small coastal studies, at the Paul Kane Gallery, are fresh, vigorous responses to landscape. She has been looking attentively at the north Mayo shoreline, particularly at the workings of the sea, the way the tide drives the water in against the irregular masses of rock and the complexities of light, movement, colour and texture that ensue - summed up in one of her titles, Kinetic Energy. Water and rock make up the substance of her pictures, and this concentration pays off in the form of some beautifully observed almost-miniatures. She doesn't attempt anything on a larger scale.

Sharing the same gallery, Fintan O'Byrne's work on paper offers a more distant, abstracted consideration of landscape. There is some oriental influence in his subtle watercolour compositions, but though they feature lots of empty space they also look oddly cluttered, and his best pieces are the more straightforward studies of bogland.

Gary Coyle's True Crime is at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until May 15th. Mark Shields is at the Grosvenor Gallery in the Ormond Hotel until May 17th. James O'Connor's Immanence and Transcendence is at the Taylor Gallery until May 8th. Samuel Walsh is at the Rubicon Gallery until May 15th. Margaret O'Sullivan and Fintan Byrne are at the Paul Kane Gallery until May 15th