Serious work that will bring a smile to your face

VISUAL ART:ULRICH VOGL'S WORKS are simple enough – once he's actually made them. However, the transition from idea to object involves a level of ingenuity not that far removed from magic. His title of his exhibition Gipfelstürmerat Kevin Kavanagh (a survey show is also running at the Dunamaise Arts Centre in Portlaoise) translates, we are told, as a mountaineer or in a more general sense "one who masters a peak or goal".

This idea, together with the imagery Vogl embraces, brings to mind the Romanticism of Casper David Friedrich, the painter of the Wanderer Above the Mists, a man who looks over an expanse of peaks sitting like islands in a sea of clouds.

Such a transcendent state is evoked by Vogl, but he also brings it down to earth by the way he approaches it, which is to use prosaic materials to generate startling, dynamic effects. He describes himself as a draftsman who opts to use unorthodox materials and techniques.

But while he ventures into mixed media and sculptural areas, he is still drawing, he maintains. In this body of work he evokes mountains, clouds, the sea and light. His materials include glass, mirrors, tinfoil and tracing paper.

One piece, involving a slide projector, is electrically powered, though it is hard to believe that several others aren’t as well, because he’s ingenious at harnessing the natural draughts and air currents to generate changing, scintillating optical effects. Walk by one of his pieces and shifting light seems to define a cloud, or reflected sunlight seems to glitter across an expanse of seawater. In one remarkable piece, beams of sunlight radiate from a cloud. The mountains, at least one of which resembles the Eiger, similarly materialise as though out of the mist or the glare, there one minute, gone the next.

This hallucinatory quality is central to Vogl’s “drawing”, which is all about the momentary confluence of diverse materials. There’s a delicacy to his way of working that entails great precision, but also a throwaway casualness. He’s not making a big deal about things, his ingenuity doesn’t call attention to itself, or of him, but draws the eye into a thoughtful engagement. By implication he undercuts the grandiosity of Friedrich’s vision, but it would be wrong to say that he is mocking it, or Friedrich. He’s more suggesting that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. Work is play, he hints, but that doesn’t mean it’s not for real. He makes serious work delivered in such a way that they will bring a smile to your face.

ANN QUINN'S PAINTINGS in Different Silences, her exhibition at the Ashford Gallery, are all related to landscape and all quite modest in scale. They are made with a nice, deft touch that bespeaks a long careful process of development as well as natural ability. While quite diverse in literal subject matter, they are also of a piece. Quinn is after something specific, something common to all the individual works. She has given some indications as to what that something might be.

In the past she’s referred to a childhood dream in which fields close to her Donegal home were transformed into an ocean and, in a similar spirit, though as a adult, of stepping outside of a tent one night in Africa to find a dazzling richness of stars above her. Mostly, she observed, it was cloudy, and her paintings are a bid to recapture that moment of unexpected clarity and wonder. This quest sets her off searching not only geographically, but also at the edges of visibility. She avoids formulaic views and is often drawn to the sky or to oblique and unusual angles. As with many painters and visual artists generally, she is particularly intrigued by what cannot quite be seen.

Her pictures are imbued with a radiant light. Glittering Seabirdsoffers an expanse of sparkling water, for example. Time and again she constructs an image in such a way that a series of almost random looking marks, like the pools of white pigment in Melnick, suddenly assume a strongly referential quality, as in the work of Liz Magill.

One can see the logic of the tactic for Quinn, because she wants to maintain that either-or tension, leaving the question open but at the same time gently prompting us to make the perceptual leap into recognition. Her paintings are very well made, considered and genuinely meditative.

MICHELLE ROGERS, whose I Am From Where I Amis at the Paul Kane Gallery, is a different kind of painter entirely. She relishes churned up, textured surfaces wracked by storms of impasto. She combines close to photographic representation with schematic symbolism and virtually abstract textural abstraction, and attacks such issues as contemporary conflicts with raw gusto and great energy, though the subject of her current show, as the title implies, has to do with her childhood memories of the Cavan village of Gowna. There is something admirable about all of this, and something likeable about Rogers's general approach.

Sometimes those passages of impasto look somewhat unwarranted, though, as if they are slathered on and then the images are superimposed, rather than emerging from a process, as the sheer density of the paint would seem to indicate. The result is a disconnect between the apparent intensity of delivery and the actuality. Rogers says the artists she admires include Frank Auerbach (texture) and Jenny Saville, and one can see the common ground in her work.

At times Anselm Kiefer comes to mind as well, quite strongly, particularly in relation to a work such as The Lakewith its place names pinned to the surface and the sweep of its perspective. Peter Doig is also a pertinent reference in relation to her big, ambitious painting Gowna. But any comparison with those artists suggests that Rogers is not working to her full potential. The smaller pieces in her show are more convincingly resolved and indicate real feeling for colour and form. She is laudably ambitious in the scope and nature of her work, but might also need to be more critical and demanding of herself.

GipfelstürmerUlrich Vogl. Kevin Kavanagh, Chancery Lane. Until Mar 28; Different SilencesPaintings by Ann Quinn. Ashford Gallery, Royal Hibernian Academy, Ely Place. Until Mar 26; I Am From Where I Am. Paintings by Michelle Rogers. Paul Kane Gallery, 6 Merrion Sq. Until Apr 4.