From Mayo to New Mexico

Reviewed:

Pat Harris, Taylor Galleries until November 20th

Eithne Carr, Hallward Gallery until November 18th

Mimmu and Mammu Rankanen, Walker and Walker, Temple Bar Gallery until November 21st

John Dunne, Origin Gallery until November 14th

Pat Harris is an Irish painter who has been based in Belgium for many years, lecturing at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp since 1986. It's fair to say that his work has always had a subdued, meditative quality, and has been acutely sensitive to atmosphere, but over the past few years all these qualities have been considerably enhanced. In this time he has come to embrace a spare, understated aesthetic that bears comparison with the work of Luc Tuymans.

His current, two-part show at the Taylor Galleries consists of Paintings from North Mayo (which formed a recent exhibition at the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar) and Pumpkins and other things, for which read gourds of various kinds, and some flowers. Between the two sets of work, an impression emerges of a painter trying to distil and simplify the elements of his art while heightening its intensity.

Keen to make work in Ireland, Harris visited Ballinglen, Co Mayo, on several occasions. Faced with the epic landscape of bog and ocean, he concentrated on intimate details, on seasonal bog pools and the battered sea stacks that stand off the coast.

From earlier to more recent work you can literally trace the progressive pruning of all embellishments. The paintings of gourds and flowers afford rather more scope for colour than the muddy greens, blues and greys of Mayo. Here the centrally positioned motifs and plain grounds recall Charles Brady's witty still lifes. Objects seem to glow with a sheer concentrated sense of presence. Like the landscapes, they are, in their eventual form, simple pictures, but it's clear that their elegant simplicity is the culmination of a long process of learning and refinement. The two bodies of work make up a fine exhibition.

Mayo and New Mexico may not be the most obvious pairing, but their radically different landscapes provide a wealth of material for Eithne Carr's Gloryscapes at the Hallward, her most satisfying exhibition to date. She has always been drawn towards the hotter end of the spectrum, and New Mexico gives her plenty of opportunity for exploring ranges of simmering pinks, yellows and earths. The headlands of north Mayo, with vast expanses of blue sea, strike a complementary, cooler note. It's not just a matter of colour, though. Carr is a Cezannesque painter, who builds her compositions carefully, and in the past her work has evidenced a degree of slackness, of not quite holding together.

With The Land of Enchantment she does some serious earth-moving, excavating a huge hollow in the foreground, before leading us back into the middle ground and a distant line of hills. The way the landscape is put together and taken apart by natural forces seems to directly parallel the way the picture is constructed. The Temple Bar Gallery has been neatly bisected to accommodate two white-themed exhibitions by two sets of sibling twins, the Finns Mimmu and Mammu Rankanen and Dubliners Walker and Walker. The latter offer an ironic take on the monolithic centrality of Modernism, as exemplified in minimal sculpture. Many cultural observers will know that they are by no means the first, and probably not the last, to do so.

Walker and Walker take their cue from Jeff Koons's delight in kitsch. They've made a group of small teddy-bear creatures, paired off as though they are alter egos for themselves. They are, incongruously, carved in a classical fine art material, marble. Each pair plays with the White Cube of modernist myth, producing a two-pronged subversion, of the category of fine art and Modernist abstraction.

The Rankanen's embark on a more wide-ranging exploration of the connotations of white as a colour in Albino, but their collaboration is altogether less seamless. A dance-like performance by Mammu, clad in white, is replayed on a video monitor, while Mimmu marshals a collection of dolls on two glass tables, beneath each of which there is a rather sinister looking life-sized mummy. Mummification is one of the themes of her modified dolls as well. They variously, and very effectively, express concepts of convalescence, purity, fragility, preservation, piety and so on. Between its various elements, this show is perhaps a little crowded, but it is extremely engaging.

Much more conventionally, John Dunne, at the Origin Gallery, takes on The Song of Songs in a series of paintings. His work has a rough-hewn look, not unlike to some of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings, made on coarse canvas with bold outlines and a conscious regard for the "primitive", but it is much more oblique and subdued than Gauguin ever was, more technically constrained and tentative.

In its favour is a visionary intensity and an innocent, gentle lyricism. Dunne can surprise with the subtlety of a gesture he captures. His theme, of a holy love, or rather the sacredness of sexual love, is not contentious and his style is not confrontational, so he'll hardly generate any publicity through controversy, but it is a show that deserves to be seen.