Symbols of time used up and lost

VISUAL ARTS: Irish Times art critic, Aidan Dunne reviews three new exhibitions in Dublin: Ronan McCrea's General-Specific at the Project; Aidan McDermott's In The Garden at the Rubicon Gallery and John Devlin: Paintings at Taylor Galleries

Reviewed

^{Ronan McCrea: General-Specific, Project, Dublin, until May 2nd (01-8819613)}

^{Aidan McDermott: In The Garden, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until April 12th (01-6708055)}

^{John Devlin: Paintings, Taylor Galleries, Dublin, until April 12th (01-6766055)}

There is a curiously forlorn quality to Ronan McCrea's exhibition General-Specific. Although made up of several distinct pieces and installations, thematically the parts coalesce into one overall work. The show consists of a series of projected slides taken from black-and-white photographic reproductions, tubular glass sculptures, sans neon, that spell out periods of time and a group of offhand and tentative drawings.

In the RHA's current group show, Greyscale/CMYK, you can see McCrea's open cardboard box of illuminated neon signs spelling out recent decades, as in "the seventies". Even though they are packed away, there is still energy and life bound up in these tokens of past time. Scattered on the ground, and without light, the glass sculptures at Project (sample: "late seventies-early eighties") are more like discarded advertisements, symbols of time not only past but also used up and lost.

The show's accompanying text tells us the drawings are posthumous studies of McCrea's father at his wake. The repeated portrait image, unsteady and barely there in the first place, is progressively eaten away by precise circular excisions as you move through the sequence of drawings.

The projected black-and-white images, stubbornly arbitrary and eclectic if we try to discern order or theme, are, we are told, taken from an encyclopedia yearbook from 1969, when he was born. They too belong to a monochrome past coloured, so to speak, only by memory. Grant Watson refers to McCrea's previous use of texts from Lucy Lippard's 1969 book Six Years: The Dematerialisation Of The Art Object From 1966 To 1972, chronicling a time when the explosive possibilities of conceptual and other art movements promised a revolution in artistic form and scope. But the past is the past, McCrea's work seems to imply, and we can't really go there any more, however much we might like to.

Where Grant suggests the legacy of that optimistic era towards the end of the 1960s provides the artist with a language and a framework within which to use it, in an exploration of something like personal significance against the indifference of lost time, it is worth asking to what extent or in what sense this is so.

The work is incredibly circumscribed and oblique, at every stage dependent on an explanatory context. Its mute, forlorn qualities, evident throughout, not only in those sad, faltering drawings, seem to imply something more limited, even a kind of estrangement. There is a feeling of not being able to accommodate things, of being inescapably removed from them. Entropy, diminished possibilities and atrophied emotions dog our attempts to recreate a personal experience of a past: this is work about loss in a language of loss.

Aidan McDermott's In The Garden presents us with a dark, enclosed fantasy world inhabited by a strange menagerie of creatures. Poussin used to work out his complex paintings in elaborate three- dimensional models, and McDermott first creates his depicted world in miniature, in three dimensions.

He marshals his cast of characters, animals real and imagined, fairy-tale and fantasy people, against lush forest settings and carefully stage-lights his offbeat tableaux.

The lighting is consciously dramatic, and the painterly approach, while drawing on photographic appearances, is carefully regulated and stylised so there is a uniform narrative vision throughout the exhibition. It is as if we are following a single story in working our way round the pictures. This evocation of an imaginative space, the "garden", in which fantasy can flourish and various things may or may not be going on functions as an allegory for a particular mode of artistic endeavour. McDermott's world, persuasively conveyed with its deep shadows and labyrinthine spaces, its flickering light, its ambiguous mingling of animate and inanimate elements, is imaginatively inviting yet leaves us feeling slightly on edge.

There is also an unease to some of John Devlin's paintings. In just seven pictures - two other, less obviously related works are included in the show - he charts the atmospheric interior of what looks like a large, comfortable 19th-century town house, moving from room to room, landing to landing, in a carefully staged, cinematic way. A sense of the psychologically charged spaces surrounding and between people comes across strongly.

The punningly titled Two Storeys indicates not just the different physical levels of the house but the separation of the two male figures. A young girl is represented as a vulnerable figure. A woman dreams of freedom.

The most positive image is the evocation of imaginative work in Gothic Study, but even here Devlin undercuts the dreamer by making a false moon of the paper lampshade. All this is delivered in a meticulous but understated way, with particular attention to the construction and layout of spaces.