Speed, energy and intensity

VISUAL ART:Monotypes: Barrie Cooke Kerlin Gallery, Anne's Lane, South Anne St Until June 5

Home Paintings by Maeve McCarthy. The Molesworth Gallery, 16 Molesworth St Tues-Fri 10.30am-5.30pm, Sat 11am-2pm Until May 28

Bihotz: New work by Patrick Michael Fitzgerald Rubicon Gallery, 10 St Stephen’s Green Tues-Sat noon-6pm Until June 5

AS A WAY of working, mono-prints seem to be made for Barrie Cooke. They suit his free, spontaneous, instinctive method, once described by Seamus Heaney as combining “quickness of perception with spareness and intensity of action”. It’s an approach that is at the heart of practically everything Cooke has done for half a century and more. So it’s surprising to find that his show of Monotypes at the Kerlin Gallery is a first. He hasn’t done anything like it before, but he’s obviously taken to the process because the exhibition, which is substantial, is something of a mini-survey, covering many of his enduring thematic preoccupations and revisiting bodies of work already completed.

Latterly, he has been best known for his pollution paintings, evidence of his disinclination to sentimentalise the natural world that he holds so dear. More often than not the works dealing with various forms of environmental despoliation are disconcertingly beautiful.

Cooke is adept at capturing the quicksilver play of light, the flow and transparency of water and, equally, the ravishing fluorescence of a mass of algae strangling the life out of a lake.

Since first coming to Ireland in the mid-1950s, he has managed to live close to nature. Not by accident, either. He is a keen fisherman and his choice of base is usually decided by its proximity to water. His homes have been in rural Co Clare, by the side of the river Nore in Thomastown, Co Kilkenny and, currently, on Lough Arrow.

Journeys to such places as Borneo, New Zealand and Cuba have usually been prompted by the combined attractions of paintings and fishing. The elemental world of his work is a place in continual ferment, a mass of interconnected organic processes involving life, death, decay and transformation, ideally exemplified in the rainforest of Borneo, which was a profound inspiration in the 1970s.

From lithe, sinuous nudes to the pattern of potato drills, from the slippery form of a fish cutting through the water to a rocky sentinel weaving braids of current around it, everything in the images is caught up in a dynamic natural dance.

It’s an extraordinarily lively show, charged with nervous energy.

MAEVE MCCARTHY’S Molesworth Gallery exhibition Home stems from a year spent living in a rented house in a west Kerry townland at the foot of mount Brandon. The two-storey farmhouse reminded her of her grandmother’s ancestral home in Co Down, and set her thinking about the links and overlaps between house and home. That is the basic idea underlying her work. In other words, she didn’t opt to hunt out the picturesque in the natural landscape, as one might expect of a painter visiting Kerry, but concentrated on the homesteads people have made within the landscape.

We don’t see people, and we don’t get to see inside the houses, but the pictures are all about habitation. There is a tremendous sense that the various buildings we see, including the one McCarthy lived in, are preserved with great effort from the depredations of time and the elements. They are islands of comfort, order and clarity.

Sometimes, especially in the more formally composed images, they are quite like sculptures, poised geometric abstractions.

It’s tempting to see these depictions of usually isolated houses, with a strong sense of inner and outer life, personal and public, as symbolic of the individual psyche, and indeed McCarthy acknowledges that in her note detailing the genesis of the show. She is a skilled naturalistic painter, and also a fine portraitist. Her forte is quiet, understated but meticulous observation, delivered with increasingly impressive technique. She simply doesn’t do stylistic flourishes, but give the work time and you will find it absorbing and beautifully made.

BIHOTZ, THE title of Patrick Michael Fitzgerald’s exhibition at the Rubicon Gallery, is the Basque word for heart, both anatomically and figuratively speaking. Fitzgerald’s work is about the self’s engagement with the world, both the physical self and the thinking, feeling self, the essence of personal identity. The paintings themselves are abstract, although they do evoke spaces and systems including, as a catalogue note mentions, the biological system that is the human body. All of this is conveyed with great verve, inventiveness and wit.

Fitzgerald is not a representational artist, though. He doesn’t make pictures that resemble the way things look. He makes pictures that correlate to the way things are, or theories we have about the way things are. One suspects that there are people who just would not get his work at all, who could not really relate to it, and not because of any lack on the part of either the work or the people. What he does emerges from a dialogue between sets of conventions and possibilities. That is, he uses the language of painting and drawing rather in the way that a musician will use an inherited tradition.

The tension that arises from the combination of predictability and unpredictability makes the work interesting. If you have no familiarity with or liking for a particular musical form or, in Fitzgerald’s case, abstract painting, you are unlikely to be persuaded. So his potential audience is likely to be specialised and to that extent limited. He’s not an especially Irish artist. There’s a distinctly international flavour to what he does. In fact, although he was born in Ireland, he attended Chelsea College of Art in London, and he is based in northern Spain, close to Bilbao – hence the show’s Basque title. And in that demanding international context, his work is easily as good as anything you’re likely to find.