Early this year, the Dublin art scene suffered a loss when Jo Rain passed away quietly in Anglesea Street. Jo Rain was a small, independent gallery run by Kevin Kavanagh. In its five-year lifetime it established its own distinctive, quirky identity and became an important venue for many, mostly younger artists. But from the beginning, it was living on borrowed time in Temple Bar. Property in the area was just worth too much. Kavanagh's tenacity in holding on for so long is more surprising than that fact that he has finally opted to move. Not too far, though. He's now based just north of the river, in a nicely proportioned space in an industrial building at 66 Great Strand Street, in the midst of an area that is, in its turn, undergoing development.
Jo Rain, though, didn't make the crossing. The new venue is simply called the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. In fact, long before the move, Kavanagh had tired of Jo Rain. He had especially tired of being asked who Jo Rain was. For years many people had their own pet theories as to the source of the name. But Kavanagh is adamant: "Jo Rain was an invention, it was just a name we made up." It was dreamt up five years ago, in February 1994. Kavanagh had just returned from a brief sojourn in America. His background wasn't in the art world - he had studied economics at TCD. But he happened to know a lot of artists and "I was interested in getting involved in that side of things". So when he heard of a space available at a reasonable rent in Anglesea Street, he decided to give it a go.
Originally the gallery was a six-month experiment, and it survived thereafter in six-monthly instalments. "It was a different kind of gallery," he feels. "Mostly it featured debut shows. And I could only programme six months in advance because I didn't know if it would still be around after that." He didn't exclusively promote a certain kind of art, but the diverse kinds of work he exhibited had in common a quality of commitment on the part of the artists, and a level of intensity of expression, that he clearly responded to. And he has been consistently able to see work from an artist's point of view and present it sympathetically. So, over time, the gallery gained a strong identity and inspired a level of respect and affection that had much to do with his approach.
The emphasis has shifted somewhat in the new space. For one thing, he has committed himself to a five-year lease and can programme ahead. "I already know what I'll be showing well into the year 2000." He will also be following up more on artists he's previously shown, though he will still feature shows by artists new to the gallery. "It's more or less all painting, plus some print. If you asked me what I'd like to do I'd say concentrate on showing the best of the younger generation of painters. I know painting is perceived as being unfashionable in some quarters, and it is certainly just one aspect of the whole thing. But I think it's interesting." Currently the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery is occupied by Helena Gorey's Landscape and Memory, easily her best show to date. The title, borrowed from Simon Schama's book, is presumably a reference to the way in which landscape becomes imbued with personal meanings. They were inspired, a brief note informs us, by "memories of a train journey through the North Western United States . . . and further south through Utah".
Each piece is based on one, muted, atmospheric colour, though in several cases panels are grouped in triptychs. Where Zebedee Jones did something similar, he built up heavy, leaden massed of pigment on his surfaces, allowing scraped paint to accumulate at the edges. Gorey has always gone for thinner surfaces. But there are layers in her work as well. She drags paint over underlying marks, muting but not eliminating tonal variations, a method of application that perhaps owes something to Gerhard Richter. Previously, because of the sheer thinness of the colour, she courted the risk of allowing her pictures to seem insubstantial. This time, on the whole, they have a subtle but altogether convincing presence. The near-white Sky, for example, is as light as a cloud but also densely atmospheric.
Various acts of transgression are enacted in Colin Martin's coloured prints at Temple Bar. They are collectively titled House and they implicitly adapt a child's-eye view of domestic family life, a claustrophobic interior world charged with rules, mysteries and taboos. Martin's tone is never moralistic, though many of the ambiguous scenes we glimpse are potentially disturbing and even abusive. In Wet Bed, a child's nose is pressed against the stained sheet by an angry adult. In Untitled a naked woman on her knees in a bedroom recoils from an unseen threat. Cousin suggests youthful sexual experimentation.
With stylistic echoes of Paula Rego, Martin renders this world in oblique, shadowy images, bathed in warm, earthy colours. The views are fragmentary, and the narratives from which they are excerpted are never elaborated, letting us draw our own conclusions. In this and other respects they recall Eric Fischl's pictures about suburban America, and as with Fischl their voyeurism, while essential, is problematic. It's only fair to say, though, that they strike a chord with many people. At his show in Cork's Triskel, for example, a woman couldn't resist telling me that she found it one of the most moving and truthful exhibitions she had seen.
Helena Gorey's Landscape and Memory is at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until Saturday. Colin Martin's House is at the Temple Bar Gallery until February 12th
