The talents of painter Charles Tyrrell and sculptor John Gibbons complement each other nicely in their collaborative exhibition at the Taylor, writes Aidan Dunne.

Reviewed

John Gibbons, Charles Tyrrell, Taylor Galleries until Oct 8 (01-6766055)

Phillip Allen, Kerlin Gallery until Oct 8 (01-6709093)

The Quarry Paintings, Mary Theresa Keown, Solomon Gallery ends today (01-6794237)

Earth, Form, Fire, Naomi Brosnan, Origin Gallery ends today (01-4785159)

They didn't collaborate in the sense of making pieces of work together. Rather they each made their own works, individually, but with a shared space in mind - the space of the gallery and what might be described as the spaces that so preoccupy both of them in their respective endeavours. There is no great or obvious similarity between them, but they certainly share a fantastic rigour of approach. You get the sense from both that everything they do is closely argued and critically scrutinised. And they seem to emerge from the same historical moment, partly because they are - roughly - contemporaries.

Gibbons is an exceptionally fluent sculptor in metal. His work has tremendous flow and energy to it. While he comes from a tradition of fabricated abstract steel sculpture, he has long moved on to accommodate myriad references, relating specifically to enclosure, coercion, loss and memory. His pieces in the Taylor draw on some of these ideas. Like two sides of the same coin, two strands of approach are immediately apparent: the evocation of closed off, contained spaces and the schematic, atomistic description of what might be within these compacted metallic parcels. It's tempting and reasonable to see each one as being readable as an individual human presence, a single, buzzing consciousness.

If Gibbons's works enact a fascination with the opposed categories of inside and outside, subject and object, Tyrrell's paintings persistently embody a comparable duality. Most of them take the format of paired squares and, while the pairs are linked, they are also stubbornly resistant to unanimity. They just won't sing from the same hymn sheet, not because the artist cannot make them, but because he is clearly interested in the fault-line of tension between the divergent voices that make up each piece. He presents us with some fascinating difficulties in reading each painting as an image. Effectively he puts us, the viewers, in the position of having to negotiate a correspondence between the two domains with which we are presented.

Gaining an inkling of the extent of the physical universe proposed by astronomy, Pascal famously noted that he feared the silence of those infinite spaces. The central expanses mapped out by Tyrrell in his worked and reworked compositions often have an intimation of unimaginable and ominous vastness. If his works continually draw our eyes back to their own edges and divisions, perhaps it is because otherwise we might get lost in those silent, endless central spaces. It is a simplification, but a legitimate one, to see Gibbons's sculptures as emblematic of presences inhabiting, and at home in, a world described with arresting clarity in Tyrrell's paintings.

At the Kerlin Gallery, Phillip Allen constructs his beautiful, witty paintings on the basis of an opposition between horizontal bands of thick impasto between which compositions of a kind of cartoon geometry are framed. It is an idiosyncratic and restrictive formula, but also a surprisingly effective and fruitful one. The masses of pigment are arranged in dense, rose-like florets of different colours. They exploit the appealing sensuality of oil paint as substance without being in the slightest bit ingratiating or sweet. In fact one of Allen's strengths is that he knows when not to make things too neat and resolved.

Even as the floral masses of paint blatantly admit that they are nothing more than a physical substance, that they are but arrangements of clotted pigment, they seduce us into reading them as something more. The same could be said of the compositions in between. While they employ a language of visual illusion, with three-dimensional effects and the evocation of recessive space, it is a language that acknowledges its own artifice, adopting a cartoon-like, schematic idiom. Yet, a bit like proponents of "intelligent design", Allen reminds us that we want to believe, that we hunger for illusion. His paintings are smart and engaging.

Mary Theresa Keown, whose Quarry Paintings are showing at the Solomon Gallery, is an unfailingly interesting, thoughtful painter. She has been consistently interested in the mechanics of representation, the way images are constructed and perceived, and she takes her concerns much further in her latest work. Along one exploratory trail, she uses fragile expanses of dry powdered pigment to signify not so much the physical properties of the paint medium as the tacitly fabricated nature of images.

Similarly, using pigment suspended in conventional, fluid medium, she makes paintings that set out to question our easy, habitual readings of all kinds of images. An obvious example is her ambitious, composite 30 Obscuras, derived from 30 fashion magazine covers. Fashion images are conspicuously constructed, and magazine covers even more so. It should be said, though, that Keown does not seem to be engaged in a critique of the fashion industry as such. What interests her is the image.

As the title indicates, she sets about obscuring the image as a way to point to the way it is constituted. She employs the extraordinary mimetic potential of oil paint in underlying representations, and then uses the expressive, opaque properties of the same paint to cancel the images, thwarting and partly obscuring them. It's a logical progression for an artist who has been both drawn to and wary of the versatility of a medium she clearly loves.

There is a flowing, molten quality to Naomi Brosnan's paintings in her Origin Gallery show Earth, Form, Fire: Sanctuary of the Cave, and not alone because she consistently uses warm earth colours, reinforced by bursts of flaming orange and yellow.

Each work homes in on a central, emergent form, a body that is not so much described as forged from hot, malleable pigment. The rhythms of the paint as it is applied equate to rhythmic body movements. From work to work, with intense, visceral energy, Brosnan builds up a sense of being locked into a trance-like, ritualised dance. Among the best pieces are those in which the body is a flickering, spectral thing, as though we are not quite sure whether it's there or not, or as if it might melt back into the molten substance that gave it momentary shape.