Reviewed

Brian Maguire, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until January 5th (01-6709093)

Jay Roche, Twelve Paintings, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until January 5th (01-8740064)

Brian Maguire's Kerlin Gallery show is the fruit of time spent last summer as artist-in-residence in two New York correctional centres, working with male and female prisoners in Chelsea and Staten Island. Next spring, the project will form the basis of an exhibition at White Box in New York and a series of billboard displays in Manhattan. There are clear echoes of Maguire's previous work, from portraits made in Portlaoise Prison onwards, including distinct projects in Belfast and Sπo Paulo, where he represented Ireland in the 1998 biennale.

In each case he begins with the image of the human face and explores how each represented identity reflects and resonates through the society that defines and forms it, includes or excludes it. The general consensus is that this procedure found its most effective expression in the Sπo Paulo Casa Da Cultura work, some of which can be seen in the IMMA exhibition enVisage, which hinges on two linked sets of portrait images. These feature children from the shanty towns and the tabloid mugshots of convicted criminals. As developed and explored by Maguire, the images both interacted and led off in thoughtful and provocative ways. The images of children became the childrens' property, for example, and were then photographically depicted in the context of their homes; or, again, we could infer that the mugshots symbolise the children's most likely future.

The New York work that we see at the Kerlin should therefore be regarded as something like a first stage in a longer, more involved process, one that is likely to have some interesting ramifications next year. But we can also view it as a coherent body of work in its own right. While it is to some extent of a piece, it also divides neatly in two: a series of sensitive, almost tender portrait drawings of individuals and more narratively inclined paintings of places, people and events.

In the charcoal drawings, Maguire favours exceptionally close views, as though the paper is in each case a small window, with the face of the subject pressed up against it. Perhaps on some level he was influenced in this approach by Nick Miller's series of large-scale portrait drawings, collectively exhibited under the title Closer. In any case, the effect is similar. We are projected into an intimate exploration of the features of another person in a way that makes it difficult for us to feel detached from the image.

Clearly, for Maguire, the point is to get us to work outwards from the immediacy of the face, as opposed to seeing the drawings from the outside working inwards, as, say, representations of a particular kind of person: the inmate of a correctional centre. In this he succeeds very well. As with the Sπo Paulo children, perhaps we'll have to wait to see exactly what he does with the perceptual process he has instituted.

We could look to the paintings for a clue. It is possible to pick up references that point cumulatively to a state of being adrift in a hard, consumerist culture. Yet it is striking that there is a distinct lightness to them, as well as these darker notes. In fact, they are straightforwardly likeable paintings, made with an airy, sunny palette. They bask in their brightness and spaciousness. If on some level they constitute a vision of the social and political matrix within which the lives of the portrait subjects are embedded, as we might expect, they do so obliquely, in an I-love-NY way. So it will be intriguing to see what Maguire does next.

Jay Roche's Twelve Paintings, at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, are cool, exploratory, process-orientated works that exploit the workings of chance. While he gives some of them apparently interrelated, referential titles, such as Morning, Night Study, Light Face and Light Figure, they seem mostly to employ an abstract language.

One of the exceptions is the stubbornly breast-like form in Night Study. That is to say, while you may try to read the painting in an abstract vein, representational patterns have an insistent way of coming through, given half a chance, as every abstract painter knows. The body and the skies are the two areas of reference possibly indicated by Roche, but in an overlapping, even common, rather than exclusive, sense.

So there is a rounded motif that might be a star, the solar disk, an eyeball, a breast. The idea of a central motif, a Cyclops, is played against the idea of systems or patterns incorporating networks of motifs. All of this is effected with a pared-down vocabulary of form and colour.

Roche applies acrylic pigment in varying dilutions, from fluid washes to quite viscous concentrations. His paintings are cool, understated, sophisticated. Agreeably open-ended, they spark off ideas without committing themselves to any line of interpretation.