FLAVOURS of Morris Louis's thrifty washes have frequently turned up on the ink and paper work of Fionnuala Ni Chiosain. In her follow up to Modern Nature, her 1994 show at the Kerlin, the artist has made the connection more explicit than ever by offering two pieces entitled Veil.
But, as her points of reference become more obvious, what they represent to the artist seems to slip out of focus. Both Veil pictures, for example, feature a frame divided" horizontally by a fickle line of white, evoking the lower hem of a thin, stiff, white gauze, thereby deliberately undermining the pose of pure painting. Ni Chiosain seems to be fond of slipping in this type of side step, forcing putative opposites together in the same frame.
More than once, for example, the work seems to allude to Daniel Buren's series of stripes. But here, as elsewhere, the point of reference serves to emphasise the significant divergence between the work of the two artists. A gap opens up between a certain notion of neutrality through industrial repetition and the unavoidable pictorial facts witnessed by tiny mazes of almost microscopic variation.
This particular dialogue is at its loudest in Requiem II, a diptych of dark stripes, dappled with globular markings, ranging from lengthy parallels to tiny, disciplined but irregular dots and dashes. The temptation is to see the lines as somehow damaged, diminished from some structural integrity, but Ni Chiosain is always careful to keep things vague, to foster uncertainty.
At times, the occasionally strident differences in style, if not in medium, make the artist's uncertainty seem more than a little arch.