Painting pictures of sadness and loss

Reviewed:Tjibbe Hooghiemstra: Nightflight, Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, until June 2nd (071-41405)Felim Egan, Cavanacor Gallery, Lifford, Co Donegal, ended May 7th (074- 9141143)Neva Elliott: Mine, Sligo Art Gallery until May 31st (071- 9145847)

Tjibbe Hooghiemstra's Nightflight, at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, in Sligo, is a substantial exhibition by the Dutch artist, who is known for his close association with Ireland and, particularly, the west. Typically, he makes mixed-media drawings, tentative and understated agglomerations of marks in pencil and brush. They have a casual air, as though they emerge through a mixture of chance and design, and they are shot through with a melancholy lyricism. Fragments of recognisable motifs, such as flowers or an upturned boat, appear from time to time, and sometimes words, shakily inscribed, perform the same function, providing us with narrative clues. There is a mood of brooding sadness and loss.

All of which holds true for the work in Nightflight. The difference is that this show also includes paintings, but they turn out to be very like the drawings. Certain images recur in the titles, notably the lake, island and boathouse. With a few other elements, these make up an overall pictorial vocabulary with clear symbolic potential.

What Hooghiemstra seems to do is to take on these emblematic motifs, such as lake and island, as indicative of the kinds of imaginative spaces he wants to create in his work. The crucial thing about his drawings and paintings is very much the space that he makes, with its misty, slowed-down, meditative qualities. It's much more a psychic space than an illusionistic version of a physical space. It's one made for mental habitation. The idea of memory is important.

Often, Hooghiemstra opts to use sheets of paper taken from old ledgers or books as a basis for drawings, documents redolent of the past, with their own histories.

To see 50 or so such muted, hesitant works in one go, as we do here, is certainly interesting. And it can prompt two simultaneous though divergent responses. On the one hand, there is no question but that you are cumulatively enveloped by the mood, that the show generates a coherent and unmistakable ambience. On the other hand, there is a distinct feeling of someone about to say but not quite saying something in the individual pieces, and repeated instances of this can become wearing.

Still, many of the individual pieces are also very beautiful and the show is well worth seeing.

Some distance further north, Felim Egan's exhibition at the Cavanacor Gallery brings him close to home: he was born just across the River Foyle in Strabane. The Cavanacor show marshals a significant body of recent paintings. Although he can certainly be described as an abstract artist, Egan has increasingly accommodated landscape references in his spare, elegant compositions.

Here his Soundings 3 series, together with Woodnote 3 and other pieces, points us towards sea and land.

He characteristically creates an overall textural ground, built up with powdered stone, and usually in a muted colour or shade of grey, although on occasion he will use a very intense colour. The unity of this ground is interrupted or offset by the intrusion of other elements, most commonly small grid ladders or wedges of different colour. It is quite a simple, limited formal vocabulary and one that Egan has used, with some variations, for a long time.

There is ample evidence, however, that limited means are no hindrance to the creation of interesting paintings, and Egan's ingenuity lies in the way he dextrously manipulates a few pictorial elements to produce consistently engaging, challenging compositions. By pushing his pictures towards the atmospherics of water and light - more, perhaps, than landscape per se - he generates a productive tension between image and object.

He undercuts the authority of the single, homogeneous image with the geometric wedges. Previously, he has implied musical associations in his painting, and these small coloured elements can be viewed as suggesting the intrusion of sound into space.

Although there is a reflective calmness to the work, it is altogether more even and upbeat than Hooghiemstra's melancholy deliberations.

As the name suggests, the Sligo Art Gallery's First Solo Award consists of a one-person show. This year's winner is Neva Elliott, and her exhibition, Mine, features a mix of new and previously shown work. Extremely diverse in form and method, its unifying thread is a concern with self-obsession in a consumer culture of therapies and pharmaceuticals. To this end, Elliott has devised her own corporate identity to market such products as her Self-Amendment medication, dispensed via vending machine.

For the show's title piece, she has trawled through acres of personal ads, editing every capsule of self-description to leave only those terms she finds personally relevant. The result is a vast, composite self-portrait in other people's words and, perhaps, a monument to self-regard.

In a similar vein, a pair of matching towels hanging on a rail both read Mine. All the while, in the background, a voice murmurs some standard self-help platitudes. If that was the extent of Elliott's work, it would be humorous and interesting, but several other pieces up the ante and give a distinctly darker undercurrent to her exploration of self-identity.

All of 309 bars of soap heaped on the floor turn out to have teeth marks cut into them. The precision of the number and the uniformity of the action refer to obsessive-compulsive rituals.

A graceful curvilinear abstract composition turns out to be a greatly enlarged image of plucked eyelashes. The piece is called Wish, and it refers to the superstition that you can wish on a shed eyebrow. Immediately, what we're looking at implies a kind of desperate yearning.

Given an area of subject matter with which we can easily identify, and with its subtle layers of meaning, this is an ingenious and very accessible show.