AFTER a generally unexciting spring season in the galleries, the combination of two exhibitions such as those of Tony O'Malley and Barrie Cooke is like the sun breaking through on a grey day. Quite obviously, they have little in common in terms of form and imagery, but both paint "nature" at a time when it is fashionably devalued - though nobody appears to have told either of them about that, and - probably they would care nothing about it anyway. And in each case, the ostensible subject has passed through the crucible of a style strongly affected by abstraction.

Cooke is, of course, an almost fanatic fisherman and a world traveller, who also loves the Irish landscape, its lakes and rivers - lakes in particular. There is little sense of topography, however, although the series Gold River Rocks (is it Australia? New Zealand? North America?) is obviously about a specific place. But the treatment is generalised - a sweeping river bend, overhanging rocks, simplified but not formalised.

Well, virtually a triptych, again shows that Cooke retains some roots in the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s.

The massive Big Ballinlig Sky has a weighty diagonal movement of clouds surging - up from the bottom right corner, and perhaps it "works" best when viewed from a certain distance. Lough Arrow Algae (there are several canvases of that name) uses a technique which is akin to stippling, and has a rich, half submerged, subaqueous glow. The rather enigmatically titled Armstrong's and the Absarokas shows a mountain range tipped with cloud, and personally I thought that the smaller version in the downstairs room was stronger and more concentrated. There is also a fish painting which harkens back to Cooke's lyrical works of the early Sixties.

Cooke's style by its nature rather tends to rhetoric, and as in the poetry of Ted Hughes, sometimes the "nature" imagery tends to outrun the subject, or even to inflate it. But he has an utterly distinctive style and a mentality unlike any other in Irish painting, or indeed in British painting either, and a lyrical audacity which leaves other, more conventional painters far down the track. This is surely his richest exhibition in several years, leaving out the massive retrospective of a few years ago.