Hughes's hues

Reviewed: Ronnie Hughes at the Rubicon Gallery; Alison Pilkington at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery; Rosie McGurran at the Temple Bar Gallery; Peter Collis at The Solomon Gallery.

Ronnie Hughes at the Rubicon (until October 23rd) and Alison Pilkington at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (until October 16th) exemplify alternative approaches to abstract painting, to use the term in a general rather than a doctrinaire way. A few years ago Hughes, a Belfast-born artist, stopped incorporating explicit representational references in layered, highly textural paintings. While the surfaces of his pictures, which ranged from very small to very large, were still layered and complex, they were built up of thin, partly transparent glazes of subdued, harmonious colours, and the forms employed - dots, doughnut and lozenge shapes - were made up a strangely self-contained, surreal world, without being in any way figurative. The way they were arranged suggested a floating, shuttling horizontal movement.

In his new exhibition, Immeasurable, he still adheres to this visual language, but has distilled it somewhat. All the paintings are modest in size, they feature fewer forms on average, and these forms float with stately certainty against backgrounds that are, for the most part, as plain and uncluttered as can be - bare linen or canvas. Still, like a jazz musician appropriating a simple tune, he gets some pretty complicated things going with these simple elements, building ingeniously balanced compositions, setting himself problems like incorporating a thick square of lemon yellow in an otherwise sedate colour scheme. All in all, it's very spare, cool and accomplished.

Seeing examples of this new body of work in Perspectives '99 in Belfast, it struck me that they suggested a certain way of relating to the world, that they might be partly about a passive, slightly distanced, almost sedated view of a tide of imagery borne to us by technology, from driving a car to looking at television or surfing the net. Perhaps that does the paintings a disservice in suggesting that they are themselves remote and anaesthetised, while they are not, but it does convey something of their flavour.

Pilkington's show, Transmitting, is another kettle of fish. She makes boldly gestural abstracts in oil, as well as smaller watercolours that spell out her inspirations in landscape. But if the words "boldly gestural abstracts" make you think of expressionist indulgence, you'd be wrong, because hers are positively cerebral paintings that happen not to be afraid of gesture without a narrative rationale: a rare thing nowadays. She operates in an area somewhere between Diana Copperwhite and Fionnuala Ni Chiosain.

There is a sense of her doing something and then standing back to dissect the result, not least in the way she sometimes soaks her brushes in water which will repel the paint unpredictably, or splashes thinners onto areas of paintwork to dissolve it in blotches. Her use of gesture can be viewed in the same way: she will brush on paint very quickly and forcefully, but then dispassionately analyse the result of the action. In this, she is not a million miles removed from the procedures of some of the socalled Action Painters, the myth of Jack the Dripper notwithstanding. Most Abstract Expressionism was never about personal expression in the way popular mythology would have it. Pilkington is disciplined and good on colour. She doesn't seem prone to any inclination to neaten things up, letting the immediate movement stand if she decides it deserves its place. She's not always successful, but some of the paintings are very good indeed and it's an extremely enjoyable exhibition.

ROSIE McGurran's series of paintings at the Temple Bar Gallery, Sleepwalker (until October 22nd), inevitably recalls comparable autobiographical works by Rita Duffy, Alice Maher and, ultimately, Paula Rego and Frida Kahloo. McGurran has worked on several mural projects, and perhaps that experience has contributed to her rather inflexible, illustrative style of simplified representation, with its heavy black outlines, dramatic chiaroscuro and overtly theatrical backdrops. Still, they are narrative paintings, and this style might have served her well if she had a substantial story to tell - or if she tried to tell it inventively.

Where the work falls down, though, is in its adherence to a static formula. It is quite repetitious. A young protagonist strikes a number of hardly varying poses against dramatically lit skies. A few cursorily rendered motifs are used as props: a stylised cottage, cups, a teapot, a toy. While McGurran is clearly a capable artist, this is not ambitious enough.

Peter Collis, showing at the Solomon Gallery (until October 21st) is the Cezanne of Wicklow, which probably makes the Sugerloaf his Mont Ste-Victoire. For many years now he has painted landscape studies of south Dublin and Wicklow (with a successful western excursion in his new work) which, in their measured, analytical approach, recall Cezanne without slavishly imitating him. The similarities include Collis's buildingblock method of constructing his compositions, and his deference to the picture plane. But he goes in for stronger tonal contrasts, and he clearly has an expressionist inclination that he indulges to varying degrees from picture to picture.

One little sea study, for example, is an untypical work that could be a homage to Sean McSweeney, and Storm over West Wicklow is a highly charged, theatrically tempestuous scene that somehow works very well. But generally Collis is an artist who operates best within precise parameters, in smallish, conventionally-constructed landscapes. When he ups the scale greatly the results are problematic, and he never seems altogether comfortable with still life. Still, why complain when he does so well what he does best?