Uncompromising, clear-headed stuff

Reviewed: Hero's Engine Cecily Brennan, Taylor Galleries until May 17th, 01-6766055. Charles Tyrrell, paintings, Fenton Gallery until May 13th, 021-4315294. Felim Egan, paintings, Vangard Gallery until May 21st, 021-4278718. Ian Stuart, sculpture, Cross Gallery until May 28th, 01-4738978.

Cecily Brennan's exhibition takes its title from her short, looped video piece Hero's Engine. A retort, suspended over a Bunsen burner, is propelled into urgent but circular movement by jets of steam expelled from vents as the water it contains boils furiously. Nothing is spelled out, but it's reasonable to infer that the Hero referred to is the mythical priestess of Aphrodite, who threw herself into a stretch of the sea known as the Hellespont when her lover, Leander, drowned while trying to swim across to her during a storm.

Despite the laboratory apparatus and the apparently neutral setting, the fiercely bubbling water and the violent movements suggest strong feelings. Strong but - excuse the pun - bottled up and boiling over, directed inwardly and destructively.

Certainly such a way of looking at the piece is supported by the more overt concerns of the works that make up the balance of the show, including another video, Collar, in which blood gushes from a woman's neck. That sounds grisly, and it is, but in a stagy, stylised way. It's also ambiguous in that we're not sure, from her actions, whether she is trying to stem the flow or actually causing it.

Apart from the two videos, Brennan shows ink drawings and watercolours. They are spare, cartoonish representations of figures under pressure, laid low by sadness and melancholy, or bearing the signs of physical injury and various devices to protect or mend the body (with a nod to Alice Maher, particularly in an image of a torso clad in chain mail). Again there is a curiously neutral, matter-of-fact quality to the treatment, but at the same time we are in no doubt about the extremity of what is involved: a self-destructive urge as absolute as Hero's. In fact the work depends on this combination of highly charged subject matter and flat, unemotional delivery, avoiding expressionist treatment. It's uncompromising and very clear-headed stuff.

It is as if, in setting about making the paintings for his show just concluding at the Fenton Gallery in Cork, Charles Tyrrell laid down a few ground rules for himself. The works all adhere to certain uniform conditions. All are composed on a right-angled grid and a square or double-square format. All arrive at a point whereby relatively large expanses of usually muted colour are bounded by narrower bands. They evidently arrive at this point via a process of attrition. Their slick, scarred surfaces have an air of being heavily worked, progressively built up and scraped back.

To make a painting is to make a surface. Ask whether Tyrrell's surfaces are more like mirrors or windows, and the answer has to be mirrors. Make a surface that doesn't offer an illusion yet offers a way in as does a mirror: it reflects our own image in the sense that it creates a space we must deal with. Our eyes skitter and skate across the surface expanses. Look closely and, despite their relative smoothness and impassivity, they are scored and scraped, a bit like the surface of ice after a legion of skaters has had a go at it.

As well, though, Tyrrell's paintings evidence a consistent interest in the edges of vision. He is always exceptionally attentive to the border areas, those bands immediately adjoining the edges which may be glimpses of whole other worlds. And he makes his own borders, bisecting paintings with clean vertical and horizontal divisions. Yet, paradoxically, the edges and divisions are almost invisible. We are coaxed into accepting arbitrary disparities and disjunctures as though they are the most natural things in the world.

As it happens, another outstanding abstract painter, Felim Egan, is also showing new work in Cork, at the Vangard Gallery. In his paintings, bands of squares with a waxy sheen are set into sand-textured, coloured surfaces. Arcs and straight lines are also scored into these surfaces. In fact, because of Egan's use of texture, the surface as such is hard to pin down. He deliberately makes it amorphous and ambiguous. This is compounded in his painted boxes, because the space he conjures up could be either outside or inside.

More like inside than out, in many respects. So that the paintings, and particularly the boxes, have a peculiarly inside-out quality. There is something musical about them as well. As ever with his paintings, they are beautiful but not in a facile or indulgent way.

Ian Stuart's sculptures, at the Cross Gallery, mostly take the form of small, altar-like groups of fetish figures and objects. Birds, eggs, animal skulls, female and phallic forms are juxtaposed in ritualistic configurations. Themes of fertility, birth, death, sacrifice, transformation and celebration emerge in terms of mythic archetypes. Stuart uses his materials, including mangrove wood, gourds, stone and bone very well.

He has great sculptural feeling, a tremendous instinct for shaping expressive forms while interfering only minimally with the medium, ingeniously using the natural character of the mangrove, for example, following the wood rather than using it as an inert substance. Sometimes, though, he seems unable to resist over-elaboration, piling on the Heart of Darkness sense of horror with heavy-handed theatricality, incorporating one or two skulls too many. To be fair though, a certain excess is intrinsic to what he's about here, and on the whole it works. There is more than a touch of what might be termed African baroque to it all, and a catalogue note mentions that he spent considerable time in East Africa and uses materials and imagery from there. Yet his intense, obsessive vision is entirely his own and comes across as such.