Return of the Lada lad

Reviewed:

David Timmons, Green on Red Gallery until July 1st

Utopia Free Zone by Madeleine Moore, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until June 24th

Blaise Smith, Molesworth Gallery until July 1st

Hot, Cold & Shadow by Jackie Cooney, Hallward Gallery until June 15th

Anne Stahl, Art Store, 56 South William Street until June 22nd

Colour Codes, Rubicon Gallery until June 24th

Black & White, Paul Kane Gallery until June 17th

David Timmons made a notable debut a few years ago at his Dun Laoghaire graduate show, with work subsequently picked up by the Gallagher Gallery's Pat Murphy for his First Look survey. In colours taken from the Lada car range, Timmons made blank, glossy, wall-hung objects which, with discreet vents and knobs, resembled dispensers or hand-driers or other generic functional devices. He has developed this basic idea since with a series of increasingly slick pieces, and the slickest yet are currently showing at the Green on Red.

Ambiguous and curiously impassive, with a fetishistic concentration on finish, they are made of shaped MDF, spray-painted to a metallic sheen, again and appropriately with car enamel - though not just from Lada models this time. The colours, allied as they are to particular car model ranges, have an odd temporal resonance, though as paintings or sculptures (they could be described as either) the works give little away. As with the blank industrial casings he began by parodying, they disguise rather than express any putative function, whether practical or aesthetic.

In a strategic move that recalls Damien Hirst, he grafts on tangential, gnomically referential titles like The need for fresh air and open spaces is greater than any hatred, to invoke wider issues. He is following a compelling line of enquiry, and it will be interesting to see where it leads him.

There are more gnomic titles in Madeleine Moore's Utopia Free Zone at Kevin Kavanagh. A series of small, uniform format paintings, crisply rendered in varieties of office grey, incorporate their titles as captions. There is a distinctly dystopian edge to Moore's evocations of information age culture. Like tablets of stone, her works are a series of cryptic IT commandments: Knowledge Generation, Information Loop and so on.

Beautifully made, delivered with cool precision, as images they suggest the symmetry of scale of the technological paradigm, extending from the miniature components of computers to the plans of buildings, cities and societies. The overall impression is one of dry scepticism, with the technology revolution viewed as a circular, self-absorbed process. Yet she is no luddite: it's more a question of a quiet, wary questioning.

At the Molesworth Gallery, Blaise Smith's vein of relaxed naturalism serves him well in a group of paintings that reflect aspects of the Irish rural environment without nostalgia or sentimental posturing. If there is a huge corrugated iron-clad barn dominating the landscape then it is there in the picture.

The great virtue of Smith's work is that it tells it like it is and, in doing so reveals an unexpected layer of beauty in the everyday. He is clearly very interested in the technical problems of representation, and several works are more about tackling these problems than anything else, which is fair enough.

He is at his best, though, in relatively conventional but exceptionally attentive landscape studies that vividly convey a sense of the rural landscape, and in quiet, unassuming studies of details of domestic interiors. On the evidence here, he is more comfortable on a small scale, and some of his larger paintings come across as over-extended enlargements of small compositions, but he is always a skilled, resourceful painter, and one worth watching.

Jackie Cooney's Hot, Cold & Shadow was inspired by visits to Arizona, New Mexico and California. Previously, she drew on the practice of archaeology, locally and, further afield, in Crete, relating to Minoan civilisation there, as sources. Those works combined almost calligraphic, gestural line work with masses of paint, an approach evident in just a couple of pieces here. From these on, she becomes more concerned with fields of colour and tone, activated by linear thrusts and feints. It is as if the desert is a page, written on by violent natural forces.

She has a distinctive colour sense that runs from muddy, tonal arrangements via hot, dense reds and yellows that embody the intense heat to light, airy blues. Overall the work is low-key and not at all ingratiating or showy. In the end, it is her sensitivity to environmental and atmospheric nuances that win you over.

Coincidentally, The Art Store, a good place to browse, currently features the work of Anne Stahl, mostly her Marina Project series, inspired by her move to Los Angeles a year ago. Her work is competent but too often she seems content to play around well within the bounds of a safe decorative formula, though there are signs that when she pushes beyond, she has the ability to do more.

In their respective group shows, the Rubicon and Paul Kane Galleries have hit upon a serendipitous division of labour, the former tackling colour and the latter Black & White. For the artists in Colour Codes, colour is a major part of their work. Among the pleasant surprises here is a set of small paintings by Tim Allen. On one level, like Sean Scully, for example, he pares painting down to a simple language and proceeds to show how a few elements can generate apparently limitless richness of imagery.

On another his work refers to the way images have become ever-changing, shifting, flickering, weightless things in the world of electronic media.

David Holland's remarkable beach ball terracotta globe is also outstanding in a thoroughly engaging, good natured show. The drawings at the Paul Kane are darker in mood but generally very good. Several gallery regulars acquit themselves very well, including Colin Crotty, whose moody pieces see him confidently incorporating figures in complex spatial compositions. There is more agreeably introspective brooding, from Megan Eustace and Helen Farrell, both of them nicely complemented by Gabrielle Quinn's quirky obsessiveness.