Soaring into a requiem and sinking into the sentinels

VISUAL ARTS: This week Aidan Dunne reviews: The Garden of Love, Anne Madden, Taylor Galleries until June 1st (01-6766055)Growing Wild, Sarah Walker, Hallward Gallery until June 1st (01- 6621482). Corban Walker, New work, Green on Red Gallery until June 22nd and The Perfumed Garden, Margaret Deignan, Origin Gallery until June 4th (01-4785826).

The title of Anne Madden's exhibition, The Garden of Love, derives from a poem by William Blake. The poem is a critique of institutional religion, but Madden co-opts the title and applies it to another, personal task. She has made a series of paintings about love and loss, and especially about the accumulation of losses inflicted by experience. So far, so elegiac. Yet, even at their most subdued, there is a soaring, almost celebratory quality to the paintings themselves that puts one more in mind of a grand majestic requiem than of a quiet lament.

Never more so than in her In Memoriam, J-P R, a tribute to the Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle who was based in Paris from 1947 and died earlier this year.

Riopelle was a formative influence on her own painting, and one could say that his influence is still evident in these pictures, in their big, intricately worked, particulate surfaces, and their bursts of brilliant colour, including gold and silver as well as the Canadian's favoured red.

The crosses, many of them, that are the central image in the paintings follow on from the cruciform shape of the bird - a dove? - in her preceding Icarus paintings, some of which are included here. Again with her Icarus works, the point is not so much the dying fall of the failed flier but a celebration of the bravery and brilliance of the attempt. That attempt, whether in the form of Icarus's flight or other quests, or for that matter artistic endeavour, is the only leverage we have against the finality of loss. Madden has a fierce, unconditional commitment to the enduring spaces, the room for manoeuvre, that we make for ourselves in the work that we do.

Sarah Walker has always had an unorthodox take on the Irish landscape, something that holds true of the work in her current show Growing Wild, at the Hallward Gallery. Her paintings are made in response to her surroundings in west Cork, where she lives, but they are not what that introduction might lead you to expect. It is tempting to say the paintings are partly about the difficulty of actually seeing the landscape. Certainly she sets about de-constructing picturesque conventions, but with a light, un-didactic touch.

First there is the question of scale. Walker's images imply we can see things in either close-up or long shot, but we cannot combine the two. This is not so much a question of literal vision as of experiencing the landscape from the inside out, so to speak, from the perspective of daily life within it, and from without, as an abstraction. It is both, and more, but we struggle to contain it in the bounds of our own conceptions.

MANY paintings isolate details - the kind of details we suddenly register in reality - against the larger, abstract canvas, literally so in the way soft colour fields are anchored by precise images of plants in flower or anecdotal snapshots of human activity. There is a continual pull in the paintings between abstraction and representation, the natural and the synthetic, expectations and reality, a didactic that is always pursued in an open, engaging, speculative way.

Corban Walker, at Green on Red, shows a series of photographic pieces, some small-scale architectonic sculptures and one very large, wall-sized installation. All the work relates in some way to the "Corban Rule", a measurement based on the sculptor's own height and perceptual proportions, and entailing a cut-off point at what looks like about four feet in old measure. The installation Untitled (Wall) is a huge, mirror-like facade with a shelf at that cut-off point, simply but effectively separating the world above from that below the line.

The photographs, of architectural details, seem to deny us a readily identifiable viewpoint, although they consistently put us in the position of looking upwards.

Conversely, the architectonic sculptures are set low so that we have to crouch down to follow the intricacies of their inner, reflective surfaces. These are like models for buildings that are, slightly but unmistakably, hostile to our presence, a hostility that is spikily manifested in the presence of the occasional oblong of sharp glass. More dramatically, one piece departs from the general pattern of building-type spaces and consists substantially of a precarious mass of glass shards: a distinctly uncomfortable but strong statement.

Margaret Deignan's The Perfumed Garden juxtaposes luxuriant close-ups of flowering plants with fragmentary glimpses of nude human figures. She refers to the flowers as "sentinels", watching over the innocent sensuality of the humans. More, there is an implication that the flowers - lilies, irises, roses, tulips, and daffodils - make up a substitute language for the human thoughts, feelings and actions. Perhaps there is a hint of a longing that we might be as at home in the world as the plants, a dream of pre-lapsarian innocence. There is an honest, no-nonsense directness to Deignan's style.

Technically she is more than equal to the demands of her imagery, certainly in the figurative works. While they are generally good, there is a certain lack of subtlety in some of the flower pieces, a sense that while, quite rightly, she wants to avoid sentimentality, she hasn't quite got to grips with the rich visual nuances of the plants.