Chung Eun-Mo's fine paintings, at the Kerlin Gallery, are abstract in an almost archetypal, classical sense. She employs flat planes of colour, hard edges and geometric forms. Yet her work unmistakably evokes real, palpable spaces in an architectonic way, never more so than in her current show. Pavillion and Pizzetta, with their arches and open expanses, go so far as to recall the piazzas of Giorgio de Chirico, whose "metaphysical" painting finds an echo in Edward Hopper's strangely evocative images of empty urban settings. Chung's paintings prompt such links partly because we instinctively look for clues when faced with an image, abstract or not, but surely she intends some such degree of association.
Although her colours are either quite flat or, occasionally, allowed a subtle, even texture, they are very much her own, quite removed from, say, Mondrian's impersonal primaries. She consistently uses a range of warm, resonant tones: radiant primrose, sun-baked terracotta, deep shadowy greens and blues. They are juxtaposed in decidedly unnaturalistic combinations, but they still bring their own implied histories to the paintings, suggestive of the way sunlight falls on buildings, outside and in, for example. She uses all these elements to set eye and mind off exploring the compositions, encouraging us to read into them all sorts of spaces - dynamically so, so that what we're looking at constantly shifts from positive to negative, foreground to background, and usually refers us back to the serene fact of the impassive picture surface itself. Inevitably, because the paintings hinge so much on spatial play, they also interact fruitfully with whatever environment they happen to be in.
Eilis O'Connell is one of a small group of sculptors (Dorothy Cross, Vivienne Roche and Kathy Prendergast are others) who transformed the scope of Irish sculpture. O'Connell's work began in modernist abstraction and developed to accommodate organic and anthropological dimensions as she enlarged her language of form - without sacrificing her exacting technical standards. Her pieces have usually been meticulously finished. In fact her preoccupation with finish and her exhaustive pursuit of beautiful forms recalls sculptors like Brancusi and Noguchi.
The Green on Red Gallery is currently showing a number of her recent sculptures in an outstanding show that sees her dealing confidently with an impressive range of concerns. Carapace takes a basic shell form and multiplies it to create a seamless, defensive unit. Her brilliant use of woven stainless steel cable is typical. Stick displays her eye for form. It consists of an amber-tinted, spindly limb encased in clear cast resin. Equal consists of two apparently identical long, elliptical forms hung one above the other.
They invite comparison, yet we can never really know if they are in fact identical, as the title implies, recalling de Kooning's putative exercise of modelling a sphere in clay, without mechanical aides, the point being that you will never know because, with art, you never do know, it just feels right. Many of O'Connell's pieces relate to this instinctive sense of something being right. The most surprising aspect of the show is probably a partial return to her earlier language in some geometric works.
In the early 1980s, Michael Mulcahy painted a series of works about Brendan the navigator, a self-conscious celebration of heroic Irish mythology. Now, with Islands at the Taylor Galleries, he has returned to this general area. One difference is that he has been based in Paris for several years now, and these paintings, largely inspired by the Skelligs, are very much home thoughts from abroad.
The vertiginous Skelligs, which formed the unlikely location for a religious settlement before being abandoned, have a particular place in Irish history, and Mulcahy relishes their mysterious past. His islands are jagged rocky outcrops set between vast expanses of sea and sky by night - though in some images a red or yellow glow suggests sunrise or sunset. Otherwise there just phosphorescent glow on the water to lend an unearthly light to the images. His pared-down treatment suits the subject matter.
He also includes two other series of works, Origins and Gardens, which are equally terse. They're also related to one another, in that they both seem to be concerned with biological processes, amorphous cellular motifs in the former and more macroscopic explosions of life in the latter. As with the Islands, where he deals with geographical entities but is interested in their mythic dimension, here he seems to want to evoke, though less successfully, the magic implicit in the whole idea of life.
The NCAD Fine Art MA students show is in the Douglas Hyde Gallery this year. It is, perhaps surprisingly, a relatively traditional affair, with four painters out of a total of six MAs. In fact you could say six out of six, for Gerry O'Brien's coloured abstract video is quite painterly. He has in mind the synaesthetic association of colour and music, and, as an audio-visual experience, his work, Correspondences, is impressive. Then there is Catherine Kelly, whose Safe as Houses is a visually striking, gigantic house of cards that also has a painterly element to it. Her playing cards writ large recall Claes Oldenberg's sculptures which capitalised on the incongruity of giving workaday objects monumental physical presence. For Kelly the cards function as a metaphor for life, for face value, rules, chance, and luck good and bad.
E. Mary Doherty takes the gallery as her starting point for a series of paintings and drawings. All are essentially tentative explorations of the space. They have an agreeably casual air, marking out areas, indicating routes and physical features, and it seemed to me they are at least as much about the impossibility of painting a place as they are paintings of a place. In fact, that is one of the most interesting things about them.
Taffina Flood is an experienced printmaker with proven abilities in texture and colour. Her paintings are less sure of themselves than her prints, though they bravely take on a bright, buoyant palette and are very competently done. Limerick-born Michael Canning's sombre, sensitively made pattern compositions find a vernacular subject in Limerick lace, with the connotations it brings with it. He also is a relatively established artist, though he is a little under-represented here.
