Spacious and firmly personal

THIS painter is relatively familiar from group exhibitions, in which she shows small, sensitive, imagistic works; but she is rarely seen in numbers. The Green on Red - if I may generalise - rather favours a certain type of work which is dainty in scale, neat, linear and epigrammatic, and ending towards chic of a certain kind. It is almost the equivalent to the one liner, or the haiku, in literature.

Rather surprisingly, it turns out that many or most of Mary Rose Binchy's paintings do not fit in with this category; they are in fact relatively spacious and strongly personal, not dinky sized and self consciously With It. Apparently she has been selected (from what kind or size of entry, I cannot claim to know) to provide visual images for a special edition of Seamus Heaney's The Death of a Naturalist, to be published by Coron Verlag in Switzerland, which should be on view in the Frankfurt a Book Fair. And these form the backbone of the present exhibition, though not all of it.

The common denominator linking these pictures is their painterliness; they have a genuine "touch" and also give off an aura of real emotional involvement with their subject(s). Otherwise, they are often quite disparate in style. A good many influences appear to be at work - late Guston, Rothko, Susan Rothenberg (the emblematic painting of a horse recalls her strongly), even Richard Diebenkorn. There is no suggestion of pastiche, but there is the overall impression, or aftertaste, of a highly individual sensibility searching urgently for a correspondingly individual style - and, in some cases, convincingly finding one.