ONCE Micky Donnelly's exquisitely executed political paintings took on and rubbished the myths of Ireland's rural idyll as portrayed by an earlier generation of Irish landscape painters. A keystone of his oeuvre was his harsh pastiche of a Paul Henry, revealing a donkey's hooves as untrimmed, neglected, the cruelty of their state unnoticed. That donkey was one of the many of this island's icons and symbols whose reality he has continued to question over the years: the Orange/Easter lily; the cartoon shillealagh/club; Fermanagh's stone head cult; Edward Carson's bowler/James Connelly's bullet holed hat. Of late his installations have offered up simpler debates and his paintings and prints have concentrated again and again - as does all the material in this current display - on querying depictions of childhood's teddy bears, harking back to the toys donated by the people of Dublin to English children after the Warrington bombing - interspersed on occasion with the sperm/humunculi figire of the early 90's.
Dermot Seymour puts his familiar icons on trial too. In his stunning and theatrical compositions cows, goats, hares and that familiar De Valera like goose perch and pose precariously as for a news photograph on the west of Ireland's coastal stacks. Somewhere, off frame the intricately inventive titles indicate, carpet bagging politician's who hark back to, and pay lip service to, a mythic green (or orange) and pleasant past join forces with the multinationals to pollute the atmosphere, degrade wild life, internationalise cultural identity, diminish biodiversity hand in hand with a farming community which sees progress measured only in their subsidies' growth. Pessimism, for both these well matched artists, is the order of the day.
