This two-tiered exhibition is based, very broadly, on a series of enlarged "blots" folded across to become a single, symmetrical image which at the same time is very free and loose. The floating, sometimes half-defined shapes reminded me vaguely of Helen Frankenthaler and other "stainers" of a generation ago, but Donnelly's shapes are often ramified and complex, like hugely enlarged diagrams of plant life.
Some of them, too, have an odd grotesquerie and they confront you (some of these canvases are quite large) with a weighty, emblematic, even menacing quality. There seems to be some debt to the kind of X-ray image which shows an embryo, shadowy human image - an effect which Louis le Brocquy has already exploited. Once again, however, the shapes are as much animal, vegetable and mineral as human, though fragments of torsos and faces can sometimes be glimpsed or half-glimpsed.
Occasionally thin application of paint gives a tentative or half-buried effect, as though the images were being viewed through an almost opaque medium.
Though both the images and the treatment might easily become repetitive, this is generally avoided by nuances of colour and by the formal device of small "panels" added at strategic points to the canvas, giving them an extra painterly dimension or "kick." And the gradations of emphasis make some of the central images loom forward aggressively, while others are suggestively veiled and almost appear to lurk beneath the paint surface.
The big, multi-panelled picture in the lobby of Temple Bar has genuine panache and an almost poster-like boldness, as if it were proclaiming some kind of manifesto, but the Taylor exhibition can claim greater subtlety by virtue of some of its smaller pieces. Plainly, however, the exhibitions form two halves of a whole and should accordingly be viewed as such.
Until March 11th.