PETER Fitzgerald, who currently has a studio at IMMA, shows a number of pictures relating to the museum. A series of his off hand images show tiny painted versions of casual snapshots of visitors to the museum. These tiny images are painted near the centre of each canvas, while the surrounding space is left empty, apparently untouched by the painter. The pictures suggest miniature models of the way paintings' might be displayed in a contemporary gallery, their status, almost more strongly defined by the white cube around them than the images themselves.
Michael Canning has already had a strong solo show at the Davis Gallery, and his large work here, which incorporates some dry carnations into a grey gravelly surface, is very much in the same vein, with the same morose but lyrical overtones.
A gallery note suggests that Diane Copperwhite's dizzy untitled abstracts offer something like a positive view of a colourful urban environment, but they certainly do not offer a positive image of the condition of contemporary painting. Like Ursula Murray's pleasant coloured geometric oils, Copperwhite's pictures seem to work successfully to their own agenda, but never quiet justify their retro choices to a wider world.
As far as retro is concerned, nothing comes close to Paul Nugent's gossamer dames, in which an impression of homogeneity often disguises the subtlest of variations.