Something out of the blue

Reviewed: extracts from a file, Willie Doherty, Kerlin Gallery until October 14th (01-6709093); More Major Mammals, Finola Jones, Green on Red Gallery until October 14th (016713414); Claremorris Open Exhibition, Claremorris until October 7th (087-6680107); David Clarke Retrospective, Frederick Gallery until September 29th (01-6707055)

IN the sequence of 40 black-and-white photographs - much more black than white - that make up extracts from a file, Willie Doherty leads us into a noirish world. In terms of visual style, his night-time images, with their richly nuanced tones of deep, velvety greys and chilly pools of sparse electric light, recall film noir and the drab, cheerless settings of Cold War intrigue. They evoke dramas of secrecy, surveillance and betrayal acted out against blank, utilitarian settings, worker housing and bureaucratic labyrinths.

In common with a great deal of contemporary urban photographic work, there are no people in the pictures, though we are in a sense implicated in them, cast in the role of voyeurs, spies loitering back in the shadows, perhaps accumulating evidence of something, perhaps waiting to catch someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.

To some extent, this amounts to a transposition of Doherty's habitual concerns from his native Derry to Berlin, where the work was made during a year-long residency, but it is a particularly appropriate transposition, with interesting resonances.

More Major Mammals perpetuates Finola Jones's interest in, well, major mammals, but also her oblique affinity with kitschmeister Jeff Koons. Koons's stone-walling leaves us to figure out for ourselves whether he is being completely ironic or sincerely unironic in his rapt monumentalisation of iconic trivia. Jones more openly employs frivolity to undercut highart seriousness.

The central part of More Major Mammals is a video projection. A murky, aqueous blue expanse fills the screen. Shades of Derek Jarman's Blue?

Gradually we become aware of stirrings in the background which reveal themselves to be a number of hippos gambolling around their zoological enclosure, looming dramatically out of the depths. With the soundtrack, they present a playful disruption of any putatively formal, aesthetic qualities we might attribute to the initial blue expanse.

A few years ago, in a major change of tack, the Claremorris Open Exhibition opted to disperse itself into the wider space of the town and its surroundings, as was (and is) the trend for group exhibitions. This year's show is so effectively dispersed and integrated that it amounts to a kind of camouflage, and what it badly needs is one good, conspicuous focal point.

There is good, pertinent work there, though. In an atmospheric installation, Christopher Banahan introduces personal memorabilia into a small, abandoned, musty, but fairly intact parlour. Claire Halpin, who reworks local family snaps, and Jennifer Trouton, with easily readable, multi-layered images mingling the personal and public that are well displayed in a show window, also work on the idea of family memory and history. Brigid Teehan, on the opposite side of the road to Trouton, and in quite a different vein, makes an effective installation as a shop window display.

Kate Byrne's subjective photographs from within a snatched and discarded handbag are well sited in the half- darkness of Warde's pub. Dee Maguire's The Bedroom looks like an intriguing idea that didn't quite achieve the form it needs. There is still a lot of conventional pictorial material in the show, conventionally displayed.

Strong among this are Barbara Freeman's etchings, based on John Cage's graphic music scores, Carol Hodder's terse, gestural compositions inspired by the Ceide Fields and Gus Lynott's bold linear studies of a child's head.

The David Clarke Retrospective at the Frederick Gallery isn't quite a retrospective in the full sense of the term. It is a modest retrospective selection of his paintings, together with a lot of work by his mother and some by his father. They are, of course, the stained glass artist Harry Clarke and the painter Margaret Clarke. Born in 1920, David studied art, travelled and painted abroad for 10 years and settled back in Ireland, working in the Harry Clarke studios. After the studios closed in 1973 he again lived and worked abroad for a time, but returned again to Ireland and is here still.

On this evidence, his work is technically very competent, relaxed, stylistically restless and with a certain in-built quality of detachment. That is, time and again he seems to set out to master the elements of a style, and does so with apparent ease, but doesn't really make it his own until, perhaps, much later on, when he develops a vein of gentle, lyrical expressionism, a little reminiscent of Kokoschka, without any of the darkness. There are examples of his series of works inspired by Galway hookers, rock pools and kites.

The show includes many fine portraits by Margaret Clarke, some of them featuring her family, including David himself and Harry. There's a very good painting of Davos, in Switzerland, while her allegorical compositions look stilted and dated, the directness and clarity of the portraits means they have worn very well.