Tom Wood's All Zones Off Peak is the record of "a 15-year photographic odyssey" around Liverpool. There is a Joycean cast to this odyssey for, like Joyce's Ulysses, his magnum opus is a portrait of a city. His audacious conceit is to more or less frame this portrait through the window of a moving bus - more or less because he allows himself slightly more room for manoeuvre, sometimes siting himself outside the bus, or in the vicinity of bus stops. But overall, what we see is a population in motion, caught endlessly in transit, a city glimpsed in passing.
Wood was born in Mayo but grew up in England and in 1978 moved to Merseyside, where he has lived and worked ever since. Inevitably, the people he photographs are often in that dream state you drift into on public transport, which can in itself make for good pictures. But besides that there is a fantastic range of expression in the images.
Individuals are variously sad, wistful, deep in earnest conversation, hunched and intent, suspicious, bullishly aggressive, quizzical, harassed, tired, amused or withdrawn. It seems voyeuristic to view them in this way, obliviously going about their lives, but it becomes clear that Wood is a sensitive observer with a genuine warmth towards his subjects.
His work is not politically pointed in any direct way, but there is a cumulative sense of struggle and deprivation. He begins, in the 1980s, in black and white, and some of these views of urban desolation are incredibly bleak. When he moves into colour and ups the scale of his images, the effect is inevitably upbeat, even though the content may be as tough.
He becomes expert, as well, at juggling with the surface complexity, presenting us with a confusing plethora of fragmentary reflected views in a way reminiscent of David Crone's paintings of Belfast, which spell out the way we come to routinely interpret the myriad spaces, perspectives, signs and motion of city life. One of the most impressive features of Wood's show is that he always maintains a balance between aesthetic considerations and his self-imposed duty to provide a record.
Francis Carty's No Place Like It at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery also features a multiplicity of views combined in one image. The show marks a big step forward. Previously he has dealt with the landscape of contemporary visual culture in terms of surreal juxtapositions of layered imagery. But he had trouble in arriving at what exactly the texture and appearance of the surface that encompassed all these layers should be. He has sorted out this problem in his recent work, which is also conceptually tighter.
In an informative catalogue note, he obliquely but effectively outlines his background and thinking. An Hiberno-Iberian, he drew equally on the casually surreal imagery of Spain and cinematic fantasy. This time around, though he doesn't say it himself, he has also taken on board the Spanish flair for textural painting and bold mark-making. And he raises the stakes in his practice of intermingling images by taking a cue from anatomical drawings of insect and reptilian creatures. Ancient and new cohabit in one seamless surface. The result is more satisfactory, with the various elements enjoying a strange, flickering presence, making us look again and again.
The paintings in Simon English's Archive at the Temple Bar Gallery depict display cabinets, bookcases and other items of furniture, and sideways views of landscape details. Both bookcases and cabinets are empty, standing in otherwise vacant, dark rooms. Each motif is repeated with only minor, insignificant variations in detail in series of paintings arranged in straight lines, all of which underlines the conceptual basis of the work - which is that the emptiness of, for example, the bookcases symbolises the desire for knowledge, a desire that can never be satisfied.
The works themselves have an air of pastiche, evoking fusty old interior and still life, with something of the atmosphere of Italian metaphysical painting. Yet English is heavily repetitive, and the need for this degree of repetition isn't really clear. Once you've made the point you've made the point. Two or perhaps three similar images might usefully amplify it. But we're offered units of limitless repetition which ultimately dilute the strength of the initial image. This problem doesn't arise with the landscapes, in which the various differences drive home the message of an overall sameness. Still, this minor reservation aside, English emerges as an interesting and extremely capable artist.
Incidentally, the members' show in the Atrium at Temple Bar is of a generally high standard, but it boasts one particularly striking painting, by Michael Coleman, that is worth a visit in itself.
Cathy Addis and Jane Byrne have a room each in the Paul Kane Gallery. Addis's paintings, inspired by a year's travelling in south-east Asia, positively luxuriate in evoking tropical seas and coral islands. While they are pleasant works that go some way towards capturing the warm bluegreen translucence of shallow tropical water, they fall between two stools in that they are not sufficiently authoritative or decisive to stand as bold, gestural compositions, and they are not subtle enough to be delicately atmospheric. Jane Byrne's small-scale, textural abstracts are intense, meditative explorations of a continuity between inner and outer space.
The surfaces are sensitively made, rugged and venerable, but then, in many pieces, spaces or openings are painted into the general textural surface in a heavy-handed, illustrative way, which rather undoes the atmosphere.
Tom Wood's All Zones Off Peak is at the Gallery of Photography until July 31st; Francis Carty's There's No Place Like It is at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until July 24th; Simon R. English is at Temple Bar Gallery until July 30th; Cathy Addis and Jane Byrne are at the Paul Kane Gallery until Aug 7th
