Well-judged construction before the builders move in

Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: Belfast's Crescent Arts Centre is due to close its doors soon for a structural overhaul, which means that the Fenderesky Gallery, a veritable institution at this stage, must also conclude its current incarnation - neither its first nor, one hopes, its last.

Reviewed

Voices, Makiko Nakamura, and United Field Paintings, John Noel Smith, Fenderesky Gallery until February 11th (048-235245) the new spirit, Madeleine Moore, Pallas Heights until February 5th (by appointment Thurs-Sat, 085-7167255)

The exhibitions occupying its two spaces are good examples of what might be called not so much the Fenderesky aesthetic as the Fenderesky sensibility. That is, the gallery accommodates an enormously varied range of work, but it is usually characterised by a certain rigour and formal complexity.

Makiko Nakamura's Voices, a group of just six paintings, is a beautifully judged show. Nakamura painstakingly builds up her work in incremental layers on a grid pattern, applying and then sanding down coats of paint. The finished surfaces, for the most part brought to a glassy sheen with several coats of varnish, have at first sight an impassive quality, appearing machine-like and uniform.

Not quite though. As you move in relation to the paintings, and as you examine them more closely, you realise that the apparently uniform surfaces are actually invested with the history of their making. Reflected light reveals bands of optical ripples. The impression of evenness derives from the patient incorporation of myriad unevenness.

The paintings are metaphorically rich. Their polished black facades bring to mind memorials, monuments, particularly the three with a vertical format. Their grid pattern and their cumulative, foliated structure could be seen as relating to the patterns of time and experience that constitute a life. A similar idea is perhaps implied in the title Voices, in the sense of many individual voices combining to produce an overall sound.

Of the two largest, square format paintings, one is black and the other a softer, muffled grey.

In a way this latter work is the key, the point of entry to the show as a whole, drawing the eye back to it again and again. It terms of the show, it provides a necessary note of amelioration.

John Noel Smith's United Field Paintings have a tripartite structure - from the top: a square of intense, "folded" colour, a band of parallel vertical stripes, and a base of dense, heavy black shot through with flashes of underlying colour. Each element is made from lusciously thick oil paint applied with practised expertise. The use of colour is bold and very well judged. Each top square is a mass of just one colour, brushed into precise diagonal arrangements, as though the colour is a material thing folded over on itself.

Taking a cue from physicists' attempts to frame unified field theories that reconcile fundamental natural forces, Smith's paintings address the unification of disparate things in a more general way.

The perfect symmetry of a single colour contrasts most dramatically with what could be described as the seething, amorphous mass of the lower sections of the pictures. The clustered lines of the central sections exhibit a looser symmetry, radiating from a central division. They are also more faltering in appearance, more handmade.

There is some transaction between the three sections of each work, but no governing coherence. The disparate elements retain distinctive characters of their own though they are directly interlinked.

The expected dialectical progression - thesis, antithesis, synthesis - remains unresolved. Smith is, incidentally, revisiting aspects of his own past work in his united fields. The upshot is that diversity isn't bad, contradictions can be tolerated.

We are left with an open, pluralistic model, a world that stops short of harmony but somehow works.

Madeleine Moore's the new spirit is a site-specific exhibition of paintings. Its location, in Pallas Heights, a vacated flat in Sean Treacy House, Buckingham Street, is part of the point. Sean Treacy House and its adjoining blocks are marked for demolition. The rationalist, grid-based construction of the run-down buildings exemplifies the passing of the modernist dream.

Visiting Pallas Heights is, obviously, not like a typical trip to an art gallery. Making your way up the spartan concrete stairwell to the sounds of demolition work proceeding in the background lends a distinctive atmosphere to the experience. Moore's exhibition occupies both floors of a two-storey flat. On the lower level the first room is painted white, a quintessential modernist colour. A large window looks southwards to the Dublin Mountains.

The three paintings on the wall address different aspects of modernism. The title piece refers to Le Corbusier's Pavilion de l'Espirit Nouveau, built in 1925 for the Paris Exposition. Le Corbusier's conception of the house as a machine for living in became the blueprint for countless utopian housing schemes. But, as the next painting, ghost station, implies, Moore looks back on the Utopian promise, knowing it has not been realised.

As it happens, the station in question, a disused metro stop, denotes another failed dream, that of East Germany. The uniformity of office, with its course in another pioneering architectural vision, is also viewed with a reflective, distanced nostalgia, as a projected future that never quite materialised.

There is a dreamy, meditative quality to Moore's understated images. The paintings are built from filmy coats of muted colour, but they have a considered presence and they gain a stubborn, persistent hold on the imagination.

There is a sequential logic to the construction of her exhibition, and to describe it undoubtedly takes from the effect of experiencing it. After the glaringly lit rationality of the dreams and schemes of Utopian planners, you ascend the stairs to a dark, unbounded space, and find yourself in another kind of world entirely. It's a startling, dramatic effect, but one that doesn't contradict the quiet, haunting nature of her work.