Donald Teskey's latest show sees the one-time painter of urban disquiet transformed into a landscape artist, clambering over cliffs, rocky outcrops and abandoned caves in search of subject matter. The transformation comes following a residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Co. Mayo. The foundation aims to provide a space in which Irish and international artists can encounter an extreme Atlantic terrain. Teskey's sojourn there seems to have had a profound effect on the artist.
But even if the painter is dealing with a brutal climate, his choice of colour seems to do everything possible to keep the lid on the tempest. His palette remains so firmly tethered within a field of green-greys and grey-blues that the pictures at times resemble grisailles. All the energy of colour, it sometimes seems, has been transferred into Teskey's athletic handling of the paint.
The work moves from small canvases, which of necessity become more abstracted, to larger works in which Teskey appears to become more engaged with the burden of representation. The big pictures are undoubtedly the more satisfying, while the smaller images seem uncomfortably truncated, as though fragments of larger images rather than self-sufficient works.
In Abandoned Van, Ballycastle, the painter grapples with an immense canvas to create an image of a small section of townland, its depopulated laneways seen from horizon-twisting high vantage.
Runs until November 22nd
