Painterly evocations of the Romantic sublime

Reviewed:

Shore - Mary Lohan, Taylor Galleries until June 2nd (01-6766055)

Studio Paintings - James Joyce and Marcel Proust, Ian Whittlesea, Temple Bar Gallery until June 10th (01-6710073)

John Boyd: Paintings, Cross Gallery until May 26th (01-4738978)

AS Shore, the title of her Taylor Galleries exhibition, suggests, Mary Lohan paints shoreline landscapes. You can look at most of her paintings and read them in terms of three horizontal strips: sky, sea, land. The horizontals are usually extended across a triptych. This adds up to a basic template that is employed with exceptional rigour throughout a sizeable body of work. It is as if she expends as much energy on excluding things from the paintings as she does on including them.

She leaves out, for example, most of the representational incident you would expect to encounter in generic landscape, which suggests she is after something else. In a sense, her pictures are extraordinarily atmospheric. Like Monet's series of paintings of haystacks or his views of Rouen Cathedral, which present successive views of a subject at different times of the day, they could almost be time-lapse studies of the same section of coast, recording shifts in light, colour and texture.

It is possible to view them as evocations of the Romantic sublime, like Casper David Friedrich's mountainous vistas, reminders of human insignificance in the face of nature's indifferent vastness or take your pick God's handiwork. But there are aspects to them that militate against such an interpretation.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer rather drastically posited that the visible world is but a blank, a flat, uninflected screen, meaningless without the operation of human will, acquiring meaning as a reflection of willed self-knowledge, and redeemable through art. There is a distinct sense, in Lohan's relentless reiteration of the empty landscape, of the world verging on something like that blankness. It's touch and go.

On the one hand, the sensuous beauty of her paintings holds out the prospect of a landscape of invitation and succour, of what looks like a good place to be. On the other, they are also distinctly cagey about what is on offer. We are always on the verge of that blankness, of lack of meaning, which gives her work a necessary toughness.

In fact, the precariousness of our position is emphasised by the spaces, the fissures that open up between the panels of the triptychs, and by the accumulations of pigment on the edges that leak out into our own real space.

And there are intimations of the endless sameness of the grid in the way one panel leads onto the next, and one work carries on and anticipates the motif from its precursor and of its successor. So in a way the landscapes hover at a point of inarticulateness, a point at which meaning is tantalisingly possible, but always dogged by uncertainty, always on the point of fading away from us.

Ian Whittlesea's Studio Paintings, at the Temple Bar Gallery, are excerpted from an exceptionally protracted project, nicely indexed (to date) in a separate, compendium work in the foyer of the exhibition space. Inside, five adjacent paintings, each four feet square, are hung close together along one wall of the gallery.

Each features seven lines of crisp text, centred, in plain block capitals. And each line is an address. In fact they are, collectively, a record of the addresses at which James Joyce lived and wrote, and hence a portrait of the artist as a peripatetic Irishman.

In this he is nicely contrasted with the solitary centrality of the Boulevard Haussman address of Marcel Proust on the opposite wall, prompting one to think of the writers' differing temperaments, circumstances, social backgrounds and styles.

One of the felicities of Whittlesea's understated work is the way it throws up such odd reflections from an unlikely premise or, in Joyce's case, premises (some 35 of them).

It is characteristic of Studio Paintings, an ongoing project based on the working addresses of writers and artists, that its initial apparent simplicity masks successive levels of physical and conceptual complexity. There is the technical methodology, for example.

While from a distance each panel has the polished anonymity of a piece of precision engineering, from close up it becomes clear that the surface is meticulously built from layer upon layer of pigment.

This suggests the way the individual workaday endeavours of each artist attain in time a sort of stately inevitability, as they become incorporated in the canon.

The stark, monumental presence of the works lend them the quality of ambiguous memorials, leaving open the question of whether Whittlesea is marking and perhaps lamenting the passing of an era of heroic artistic endeavour or undercutting heroic pretensions by focusing on the mundane.

John Boyd's paintings, at the Cross Gallery, draw us into a claustrophobic, Pinteresque world in which a hapless protagonist, as careworn as John Hurt on a bad day, is reduced to the status of a puppet. That, at any rate, is the impression conveyed by a series of tableau-like images in which the exceptionally glum-looking, besuited character, sometimes accompanied by a doppelganger, sometimes masked, is pushed and pulled by invisible forces.

He seems to relish both his helplessness and the element of performance, though, and it's hard to know whether self-loathing or self-regard are uppermost in his mind. The use of kinds of dances as picture titles suggests an unseen presence is calling the tune. That would be the artist, presumably, who delivers his material in a highly mannerised style of showy theatricality.