WITH this exhibition, the Taylor Galleries, as we know them, come to an end the new regime, which will start in some months time, also in Kildare Street but near the Stephen's Green end, will be something different. It is a considerable event, since the present gallery - linear heir to the old Dawson Gallery - has been a centrepiece in Dublin (and Irish) art.
Pat Harris, now living and active in Antwerp, makes a good but unspectacular final exhibitor. His early work was edgier and more expressionist, but he has quietened since then, has lost the angularity and rather monochrome quality of his paintings of the 1980s, and nowadays works in a quieter, more harmonious palette based on greens, browns, greys and whites. It is more accomplished than formerly; but, arguably, it is also rather more conventional.
He slides easily from figurativism to abstraction, and the brushwork calls the tune. In fact, all the pictures have figurative titles, so presumably they all have a basis in nature, but in several eases they are about paint rather than subject matter. Landscape, a flooded pond, flower pieces, swans (little more than a gleam or smear of white pigment) and shrubs form the ground base, and on this Harris builds cultured, intelligent paintings. An intimate, faintly melancholy mood is sometimes felt.
Though tonally they are very different, the Irish painter he most resembles now is Brian Ballard. Both are smooth technicians, both have a feeling for nature and for light, and each inhabits the middle ground without descending into academicism.