AN important O'Malley exhibition has just closed in Limerick, on the same day that another opened in the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny. The first mentioned was built around his religious works, the core of, which is formed by the Good Friday and Easter pictures he has painted over a period of decades. This exhibition began as an initiative - and an imaginative one it was the Sligo Art Gallery, where it ran for some weeks before moving to Limerick. For a number of reasons, I was unable to view it to its original venue, but the Limerick City Gallery has rather better hang in space than the Sligo one - with all res eels to that excellent institution.

O Malley has in many ways a deeply religious temperament, using that term in the broadest sense, and as with so many Irish writers and artists, religious imagery entered his imagination at an early, perhaps preconscious age. It is stating the obvious to say that growing up where he did, the stone carvings and the austere, hieratic aspect of the various ruined abbeys and churches in Kilkenny became part of his inner self. In these, he could feel himself sinking into a racial and cultural past as well as a religious one.

The sense of Fall and redemption, death and resurrection, are familiar areas of his work and they are combined with a pantheistic sense of the cycle of nature and of decay and renewal, spiritual as well as physical. It is an Old Irish synthesis, perhaps, as in the case of the hermit monks whose asceticism did not rule out a vivid response to nature.

In certain works the imagery of the Cross and the Christian mystery is powerfully explicit; in others the reference is oblique and rarefied. Good Friday Painting 1992 has a ghostly, nebulous presence, it is recognisably a "spirit" painting. Others are abstract pictures, the mood of which is withdrawn and brooding, while the gouache The Four Gospels divides into four abstract "panels."

There was a solid core of genuine masterpieces in this choice of 42 works, which covers O'Malley's wood constructions and also includes some of his early, still halting efforts as an artist. It was hard to imagine anybody agnostic, believer, atheist being unmoved by the visible emotional and expressive power of the exhibition as a whole. There is a brief but thoughtful catalogue foreword by Father Enda McDonach of Maynooth.

THE Butler Gallery in Kilkenny has for some time been a friend of O'Malley and his art, and the exhibition newly on show there concentrates on the most recent of the pictures he has painted of the small pond in his garden at Callan, created by his wife Jane. These go back almost a decade and, O'Malley being a very prolific artist, there are many of them, painted in all weathers and all lights.

Obvious parallels will spring to mind, Monet being of course the first, but a contemporary one offers itself in Sean McSweeney's bog pool pictures of his adopted country, Sligo.

These are recognisably "third period" works by a painter now in his 80s, abstracting from nature rather than depicting it, yet still absorbed in its shifting patterns and colours and - in this case - reflections. There is little trace left of O'Malley's early expressionist figurative phase and not much even of his St Ives abstract one. There is, however, a definite closeness to the brightly toned Bahamian paintings of a decade and a half ago.

O'Malley at his starkest has never seemed to me a formal abstractionist; he needs the initial stimulus of a subject, even when it passes through the sightbarrier of his late style. A pool in itself is endlessly suggestive, both as a mirror to the seasons, a mirror to the self, and as something which is continually renewed by nature. Its place in Irish myth and poetry needs no reminder, but it goes back farther and extends wider - you only have to think of Horace's Bandusian spring, or the various ponds and lakes of the Old Testament.

Taking my cue from work seen recently at the Taylor Galleries, I had expected an exhibition emphasising almost Oriental qualities of contemplation, and somewhat withdrawn in mood. However the overall character of the exhibition is joyful and even extrovert, emphasising bright colours, spring luminosity rather than winter darks, and rich, almost decorative patterns rather than formal austerity.

The paintings are on canvas, and personally I prefer O'Malley's works on board; I also prefer his more brooding, sombre toned aspect to his, more obviously colourful. However, this is a significant body of work from one of the genuinely major figures in Irish, art, whose vitality remains unsapped by lime or fashion.