According to the handout sheet, these works are linked with the artist's recent travels in Mexico and Australia. Broadly speaking, they fall into two lots: the first is made up of paintings - sometimes divided into four, sometimes virtual diptychs - in a kind of striated format, created in alternate ridges of thick and thinner paint. The effect is rather like looking over a faintly undulating plain or desert, or perhaps even expanses of rippling water.
The second section - if you can legitimately call it that - is dominated by grays, and the style is notably different. It suggests shapes, both arbitrary and natural, which have been modelled or scraped in river mud or boulder clay, and there is a close-up focus giving the pictures almost the look of black-and-white photography.
In spite of the monochrome effect, the modelling is forceful and also faintly hallucinatory. It is, however, difficult to make the contrasting halves of the exhibition fit one another; they almost look as if done by different hands.
In spite of this too-obvious division, and the rather small number (only nine in all) of works on view, the exhibition overall has a strongly-defined personality, and the sense of half-buried, emergent colour is impressive. Oliver Whelan, without question, has an inborn feeling for paint, though I am not entirely convinced that he has so far found just that particular kind of imagery which would give his talents the fullest play.
Until February 6th.