Fergus Martin is known for his impassive, minimal sequences of abstract paintings and sculptures, which, as he puts it, "were concerned with what I think of as pressure points", hingeing on the containment or release of energies.
Simply put, by repeating units of form he engendered a sense of containment, of energies held in check. By breaking the fixity he implied a release from the focus of containment. Despite the past tense, the description still fits his concerns and strategy in some of the work in his new show at the Green on Red Gallery.
Besides that work, and echoing the example of Mark Joyce, his exhibition marks a departure in turning to photography. And, rather than seek out obvious photographic equivalents for the abstractions with which he is associated, Martin jumps in at the deep end with a series of self-portraits.
In fact, as he notes, the trigger for this work was an invitation to contribute to the National Self-Portrait Collection. Rather than be content with offering a piece in a signature style - a kind of self-portrait, after all - he opted to take the opportunity to work in photography. He mentions, intriguingly, that he was in any case "an obsessive taker of photographs".
Not content with a straightforward self-image, he set about some "digital surgery" that proved radical. The resultant six "portraits" are manipulations of his own image, which served as the basis for the construction of an eerie character who, subject to a range of lighting conditions and expressions, looks both ordinary and disturbingly wrong.
The crispness and clarity of the images - one of his interests was to draw on the treatment of fabric in Renaissance painting - underline the fact that all is not right. Oddly enough, it becomes apparent that, in extending, compressing, reflecting and repeating the human image, Martin is continuing the concerns of his other work in a markedly different form.
Given the emphatic, fleshy physicality of her previous work, in a show appositely titled Embodied, the figure is conspicuously absent from Buoyant, Adrienne Dooling's new exhibition at the Paul Kane Gallery. Absent but consistently implied, and there in at least a spectral way once or twice.
The show features two series of work, one to each room of the gallery. That in the first explores some domestic settings. Ostensibly innocuous items such as chairs, doorknobs and stairways are given an ominous narrative edge in bare, gloomy interiors - house and barn - with an abandoned look.
The mood picks up in the second room, which features studies of yachts, yet rather than the sense of freedom or release we might expect in images of the sea, we are for the most part restricted to the dark confines of the vessel's architecture. Somehow, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca comes to mind in relation to these musings on past darkness.
Dooling is a gutsy, capable artist and, while in some of the drawings the mood becomes perhaps too hermetic, too inwardly directed, there is much to applaud, including the atmospheric delivery, some felicitous drawing and an easy way with paint, not to mention the interesting, quasi-narrative structure. And, of course, a willingness to move on.
John Philip Murray's Drawing From Mosaics at the Guinness Gallery takes as its starting point the remains of Roman mosaics in Tunisia. The paintings - they are paintings drawn from mosaics rather than drawings from mosaics - describe the way the brilliant light turns sections of mosaic grids into dazzling, iridescent surfaces, anchored by darker bands of border tiles and interrupted by the enigmatic presence of fragmentary human heads, portrait subjects including, apparently, Virgil.
By noting the beauty of these venerable surfaces with what come across as references to contemporary abstraction, Murray could be commenting on the endurance of aesthetic concerns. By contrast, the human presence flits across and is gone. The point is underlined in a good triptych of three head studies in which we can never quite settle on the features depicted, although there is a sense of human presence in each.
There is a phantasmagoric quality to Frank Carty's paintings in The Last Mansion at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. Composed of interlocking layers of disparate imagery, built up in patterns of heightened, flattish colour, they have a dreamy, slow-motion quality.
Painted on muslin mounted on wood, the awkwardness of the dry, brittle-looking surfaces expunges any hints of expressive gesture. Like Peter Doig, Carty presumes our familiarity with pop-culture images, particularly from cinema, and we seem in his work to drift through a world in which media images have the same currency as workaday reality.
Mark Demsteader's paintings and drawings, at the Art Store, are self-consciously moody, dark, close studies of single female figures or, as often as not, heads. Demsteader is technically capable, though there is more than a touch of mannerism to his practice of working the surfaces of his paintings into roughened patches of texture that bear no relation to the image, and his romantic, illustrative style recalls the art of album sleeves before the era of the compact disc.
