Waves of colour washing away from the shore

Visual Arts Aidan DunneReviewed: Weather, Mary Lohan, Taylor Galleries Until May 1 (01-6766055) United Field Paintings, John Noel Smith, Green on Red Gallery until May 22nd (01-6713414)

Weather is a good title for Mary Lohan's outstanding exhibition of paintings at the Taylor Gallery. The show could be described concisely as consisting of a series of landscapes inspired by the west of Ireland shoreline.

Such a description suggests, not inaccurately, that we are in the territory of Paul Henry, James Humbert Craig, Maurice McGonigal, Sean Keating and who knows how many others. In the variously romanticised and mythologised West, that is to say.

But there are distinctive characteristics that set Lohan's work apart from the tradition to which it is most obviously linked.

For one thing, her gaze is always out to sea, away from the land, to the extent that her paintings are primarily about the sea and the screens of weather that endlessly recreate its appearance. Usually we are offered a tidal threshold, a momentary vantage point of sand or sometimes mud from which we might find our way into the expanse of ocean and sky. But there is nothing conventionally picturesque about any of this.

Some years back Lohan began to extend the standard compositional rectangle by using diptych and triptych formats. She goes even further in this show with several polyptychs.

There is a space between each component panel, and the introduction of such spaces might seem to undermine the integrity of the image, break its spell, so to speak. It could also be seen as a means of suggesting the idea of absence.

But with a very simplified compositional format - roughly speaking, horizontal bands of land, sea and sky - the multiple panels also function as a grid. In other words, it is as if the image could go on indefinitely, as if the space might be extended forever.

While there is certainly colour in Lohan's paintings - pinks and blues play a central role in her current show - they are predominantly tonal, and furthermore they tend towards muted, mid tones, away from graphic contrasts.

This has to do, at least partly, with the way they are made. As their dense, richly textured surfaces and those thick overhangs of variegated pigment along the rims attest, they are built up layer on layer, painted wet on wet. Worked over again and again, colour will tend to be subdued, contrast neutralised.

There is a feeling that the eventual image has been fought for, is hard-won, the culmination of an exacting process. What is extraordinary is that, given such a long, cumulative process, the surfaces are so vital and subtle, full of nuance and shimmer and sparkle.

Because she avoids including any of the trappings of contemporary development, from roads and cars to conspicuous houses, it could be argued that she is adopting a nostalgic, romanticised attitude towards her subject matter.

But the fact is her subject is not the landscape of the west or north west of Ireland, so the question of avoidance doesn't arise. She is after something else entirely. That something might be landscape, or seascape, as an idealised, malleable space.

In a way the work itself is non-committal. Through its rigour it eschews sentimentality and even emotion, while leaving room for an emotional response. There is a continual tension between the way paint is simply and matter-of-factly paint, and simultaneously what can only be described as a magical substance.

In this show more than any previous one by her, there is a sense of weather as a screen, as though paint is used not to describe the tangible reality of land and sea but to give tangible reality to evanescent and insubstantial things such as air, moisture, mist, light. Beautifully installed over four rooms of the gallery, it is one of her finest shows to date.

The Holy Grail in contemporary physics is the Theory of Everything (TOE). Depending on which theorist you listen to, there are several potential candidates - superstrings, quantum gravity - for the TOE, which obviously cannot be right. It's either everything or it's not. Any prospective super-theory has to reconcile and unify the fundamental natural forces in a unified field. It seems that the title of John Noel Smith's exhibition United Field Paintings at Green on Red alludes to this aspiration.

Smith, an extremely accomplished painter, is fond of metaphor and allusion in his work and in his titles. Usually his pictures function on several levels, and this show is no exception. All the work follows the same basic pattern, consisting of three distinct elements stacked one above the other: a panel of pure colour, a band of vertical stripes and a band of thick black pigment with flashes of colour showing through.

Each painting is an attempt to unify three related but disparate elements. What of the physics metaphor, given that any TOE has to deal with four fundamental forces? Well, the central component of Smith's arrangement, in which the vertical lines look like outsize stitches holding the other pieces together, could represent the combination of two properties or forces.

More to the point, however, Smith is not primarily concocting a schematic representation of theories of everything. He is also conducting a tongue-in-cheek dialogue with theories of art. In this context the aesthetic theory of everything could be the Modernist dream of an all-encompassing style, a single grand narrative. The Post-Modern perspective suggests that such an all-inclusive style is simply impossible.

The three-part paintings effectively de-construct elements of painting itself, breaking it down and separating it into colour, line and texture. There are hints at other ideas.

The strictly brushed diagonal patterns of the colour panels recall Ciaran Lennon's compositions exploring flatness, depth and illusion in painting.

The vertical lines recall Smith's own Ogham paintings about symbolic systems of meaning. Politically, the United Field can also be interpreted as Ireland or even, given the timing, Europe.

Smith uses strong, intense colour and is a virtuoso textural painter.

Each piece in the show is a paradox. Its constituent elements remain resolutely unreconciled, but somehow work together. There are hints and echoes, of colour and texture for example, that allow the possibility of an underlying consistency, a unified field. But the question of a synthesis is left open - dynamically open.