Machinations: the Art of the Machine, The Ark, Temple Bar until November 21st (01-6707788). Mark Francis, Kerlin Gallery until November 15th (01-6709093). Passings, Pat Harris, Taylor Galleries until November 8th (01- 6766055).
It is a didactic exhibition and it fits within a carefully designed programme incorporating a sculptural workshop with Laurent Mellet. All of which fulfils the Ark's brief, but it should be said that Machinations is well worth a visit as an exhibition in itself. It includes several substantial pieces by kinetic artist Bernie Lubell and a richly detailed imaginative recreation of Leonardo da Vinci's last studio at Cloux, Amboise, in France.
Well, it is more a fanciful than an imaginative version of the studio, but it is brilliantly done and vividly evokes Leonardo's omnivorous curiosity and the restless diversity of his interests. By the time he settled at Cloux he was more preoccupied with science than art, and the wealth of material assembled here reflects his achievements as anatomist, engineer and natural scientist as well as painter, sculptor and even musician. The original Renaissance man, he has attracted the attention of psychoanalysts as much as art historians because of certain qualities in his character.
In particular, while he embraced an extensive range of activities with incredible intelligence and concentration, he was notoriously reluctant when it came to completing projects.
Freud pinned this "closure complex" on issues of sexual identity. To which one might retort: Well, he would, wouldn't he. But others, including Darian Leader in his fascinating book, Stealing the Mona Lisa, make a convincing case for the workings of complex psychological factors in Leonardo's artistic and other endeavours.
He famously anticipated many technological innovations, including the helicopter, the submarine and the tank, as well as devising novel versions of existing machines; it's pretty much accepted that he discovered the circulatory system of blood in the human body. Yet many of his discoveries and inventions exist only in the form of beautiful, intricate drawings. Machinations includes a number of marvellous large-scale models based on his drawings (built by Shadow Creations and Mick Kelly).
Apart from the various facsimiles and models of Leonardo's pieces, the main exhibits are by kinetic artist Bernie Lubell. His extraordinary sculptures are like fantastic hybrids of elements of Leonardo's drawings, the functionless and self-destructive machines of Jean Tinguely and the pointlessly ingenious contraptions envisaged by cartoonist Heath Robinson. They are made chiefly of wood, with some rope, plastic and whatever else might be necessary. They have an engaging informality and inconclusiveness about them, as if Lubell is drawing with wood, that seems quite in sympathy with the dreamy, speculative nature of Leonardo's drawings, not to mention his resistance to following anything to its logical conclusion.
One piece inventively adapts the special-effects technique of using black plastic to stand in for a storm-tossed sea, another marks time by the movements of a rocking chair: time and the measure of time are in fact recurrent preoccupations in Lubell's work. That work is certainly art, and highly involving art, but the show could also be subtitled 'The Romance of Machines', because of the way it quietly entices the imagination into a sense of the excitement of mechanical inventiveness, instilling the idea that problem-solving is a kind of play. In this, it does a great service to both art and science.
Mark Francis, whose recent work is on show at the Kerlin Gallery, established his reputation more than a decade ago with spare, monochromatic paintings that resembled vast enlargements of microscopic images of sperm and spores. These stark paintings, made from thinly applied paint and slightly blurred by the application of a Gerhard Richter-like smearing effect, had a cold, even sinister quality given a growing public awareness of HIV and other ominous viral threats, and indeed genetics and all its attendant issues.
Francis still operates in this general area. The main development in his work has been his employment of a grid, that emblematic modernist scaffolding. It tends to reinforce the existing implications of his images, evoking the idea of networks in both organic and inorganic contexts. His paintings are also more inclined to suggest depth in a photographic way, with successive layers of imagery floating in a shallow pictorial space.
While he has been a consistently accomplished painter, he did tend to flirt with settling for a formulaic slickness.
That tendency persists. The pictures are as beautifully made and good to look at as ever. But there is more to them than that as well. There is an elegant complexity to much of the work here that is not a million miles away from the looping forms of Brice Marden's Cold Mountain series, and he is prepared to push things, to risk unlikely and even unattractive textures and colours in a way that recalls Barrie Cooke's paintings of environmentally destructive organisms.
There is a consistently elegiac note to Pat Harris's appropriately titled exhibition, Passings, at the Taylor Galleries. His paintings of flowers, gourds and stretches of landscape are made within a subdued, reflective register, with a touch of melancholy. He is based in Belgium and it is reasonable to discern the ethos of Luc Tuymans in his mode of working.
The dominant themes that emerge have to do with transience, ephemerality and absence. Flowers bloom, fade and disappear. They have a delicate brilliance and are gone. In several of the flower pieces it is as if an awareness of this has already obliterated visible traces of the blossoms, even though they are there before us. The gourds are ghosts of presence, with all the form and promise of vitality, but they are empty.
In the landscapes, green expanses are interrupted by shell craters filled with rainwater. It is meditative and quietly persuasive work.
