City and country get a psychedelic charge

VISUAL ARTS: Americanaire, The Urban in The Rural

Graham Crowley and Colin Martin, Cross Gallery, 59 Francis St Until May 29 01-4545391

MARK ST JOHN Ellis curates the two-person show Americanaire, The Urban in The Ruralat the Cross Gallery, and the starting point was a remark by a visitor from mainland Europe, suggesting that new houses in rural Ireland resemble suburban American dwellings, and look distinctly uncomfortable in the countryside. St John Ellis did not set out to illustrate this proposition, though one could certainly do so without too much trouble. Rather he looked at work by two artists with experience of painting settings urban and rural in Ireland and elsewhere, and lets us draw our own conclusions.

Though English by birth, Graham Crowley now lives for much of the time in rural west Cork. The paintings he shows feature locations on both sides of the Irish Sea and they feature both the urban in the rural and the opposite: views of high rise housing developments soar above a luxuriant woodland canopy in London. It’s a case of the concentrated urbanism of the high rises allowing leeway for extensive planting. Parkland imports a little bit of the countryside to the city.

On the other hand, Crowley has long been struck by the vivid, electric colours often chosen by country dwellers in Ireland. Rather than blending in, one-off houses can positively leap out of their surrounding. His paintings are usually close to monochrome. Most of each image is rendered in terms of grey tones. Instead of being applied in a conventional way, pigment is scraped away and manipulated again in a brilliant background colour, a bright hue that suffuses and dominates each painting. This gives the works a psychedelic charge but doesn’t overbalance them. They still maintain a sure, classical poise.

They acknowledge all sorts of visual sources and ideas, and synthesise them all brilliantly in the language of painting.

Colin Martin’s paintings are crisply made and close to photographic on several levels. He zeroes in on pieces of residential streetscapes in what looks like a West Coast American city. Rather than going for the salubrious suburbs with generous planting and a quasi-rural feeling, though, he is downtown. There’s a curiously provisional, improvisational feeling to the way the houses are put together from light wood and sheet materials, as though they are very temporary structures that could disappear tomorrow. The neighbourhoods are laid out in a grid pattern but the buildings are not uniform, they’re customised according to the whims of their occupants.

Martin depicts these buildings and places in a calm, dispassionate way. We see cars but not people. The mood recalls that of some American documentary photography, notably Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, a highly influential photographic exploration of everyday America, more or less in the form of a road trip, originally published as a book by Aperture in 1982. Martin is technically very good, and it’s pleasing to see the way he uses paint precisely and fluently, but there is something unresolved about his work’s relationship to photography.

Between Sight and Sound

Ronan McCrea, Aurélian Froment and Dot Dot Dot, Green on Red Gallery, 26-28 Lombard St East Tues-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 1-4pm Until May 29 01-6713414

Between Sight and Soundis an intriguing show featuring three artists – one of whom is actually a collaborative partnership. French artist Aurélian Froment, Irish artist Ronan McCrea and American publishers Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey) are all different and distinct from each other but they share, Green on Red suggests, a penchant for accessing the visual in their work through the verbal or aural. This relates to the linguistic obsession underlying a great deal of critical theory. What these artists offer is a critical engagement with the way we interpret the visual and give it meaning framed within language.

McCrea’s slide-tape installation becomes cumulatively more interesting as it progresses. Images of a young woman are projected, upside-down, onto views of an Italian city. There are two voices, both male, one speaking in English, one in Italian. The Italian, apparently a writer, is discussing the composition of a fiction with a female protagonist. Questions, discrepancies and doubts creep into the process. The atmosphere recalls European cinema of a recent era.

Somehow the persistent reappearance of the real, upside-down woman seems to taunt the fictional ambitions of the writer.

Froment, who is based in Ireland, shows a five-minute video, Pulmo Marina, in which we see an ethereal, transparent jellyfish suspended against a pure blue background. It's a dreamy, beautiful image. Then, into this reverie, an unseen, jarringly matter-of-fact narrator intrudes to provide a standard nature documentary homily on the jellyfish. It's a simple and effective idea. The Dexter Sinister contribution is an edition of Dot Dot Dot, a long-running conceptual-theoretical periodical. The periodical consists of a fold-out poster inscribed with a substantial collection of visual material, mostly collaged fragments of printed images. A text print-out, casually displayed on the wall beside it, provides a verbose, meandering commentary on what we see on the fold-out. It certainly does encourage you to reflect on the relationship between language and image but, given the nature of the presentation, the odds are heavily stacked in favour of language.

New Works

James McCreary, Leo Higgins and Michael Cullen, Graphic Studio Gallery, Through the arch, Cope St, Temple Bar Mon-Fri 10am-5.30pm, Sat 11am-5pm Until May 29 01-6798021

Of the three artists sharing the Graphic Studio Gallery, one is strictly a printmaker, one a painter-printmaker and one a sculptor.

Both printmaker James McCreary and sculptor Leo Higgins have long experience in the technical aspects of their crafts, in the print workshop and the foundry respectively. Higgins shows a series of medium-sized bronzes based on the motif of the tree, sometimes incorporating a bird.

He has a tough-minded, no-nonsense sense of form that prevents the works becoming sentimental, but he still manages to impart a gentle lyricism in well-judged pieces.

McCreary possesses all the obsessiveness of the practicing printmaker. Using mezzotint, he rhythmically generates tight, abstracted views of expanses of forest, mostly in a letterbox format – when he increases the vertical proportion of the plate, it’s as though he’s opened the front door.

Michael Cullen is a painter with long experience of, and a flair for, print. Here, working with printer Robert Russell, he lightly animates a couple of habitual themes, including the circus which is, as is often the case with him, an autobiographical allegory. Several of his prints are real gems.