Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: Reviewed this week:  Eithne Jordan at the Rubicon Gallery, Felim Egan at the Kerlin Gallery, Taffina Flood at the Hallward Gallery and George Potter at the Taylor Galleries.

Eithne Jordan, exhibiting at the Rubicon Gallery, is a consistently interesting and challenging painter. She has long eschewed pyrotechnics in favour of understatement, sometimes producing paintings that verge on dissolving completely into a murky soup of grey mid-tones. Her current show at the Rubicon suggests that she is pressing ahead with a long-term personal project to investigate traditional painting genres, a project that, though it is not explicitly stated, we can infer from her work with figure, interiors, still life and landscape.

She has worked her way tentatively but intently into each of these areas. A tender and lyrical figure painter, she has also made intriguing architectonic interiors and some very fine, Poussinesque landscapes. Still life has proved to be a harder nut to crack and in some respects this show, which is loosely concerned with landscape, continues her campaign to find a personal approach to still life.

Her subjects, empty motorway bridges or deserted industrial warehouses, are anonymously functional contemporary spaces, further drained of distinctiveness by her deadpan treatment, which seems on occasion perversely understated, with only the most cursory gestures towards textural or other detail. Which leads one to suppose that understatement is the point.

The warehouses and yards have the ambiguous abstraction of a Morandi still life. In his case the group of jars and bottles might as easily be big architectural forms, in hers, the buildings and chimneys might be boxes and bottles on a table. But Morandi painted small, and Jordan chooses to emphasise the lack of incident that she is presumably aiming for by enlarging her compositions to almost two-metre widths.

She allows herself some colour and atmospheric richness only in a few very small and quite beautiful compositions. There is a sense that the larger works are not quite there yet, but she is an artist who has always more than re-paid the viewer's patience in the long run.

Music is a recurrent point of reference in relation to Felim Egan's paintings. His subtly coloured, sumptuously textured grounds, animated by the play of geometric motifs, little squares and lines, lend themselves to description in musical terms like harmony and rhythm, theme and variation.

Now, with his new work at the Kerlin Gallery, he positively encourages such musical readings. The show is called intervals in blue and preludes for abg. He employs a relatively spare formal language but allows a wealth of atmospheric effects, generally attributed, like the big background expanses in his paintings, to the landscape outside his front door at Sandymount, where sand, sea and sky provide an ever-changing vista of vast open spaces.

The catalogue essay reveals that his intervals and preludes take their cue from J. S. Bach's dazzling polyphonic inventiveness, as relayed by Keith Jarrett in a recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier, although temperamentally one would be inclined to place him closer to contemporary minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt.

Yet what the work brings to mind is not so much music as architecture. The preludes are a series of square-fronted boxes, painted on five sides. With their horizontal rows of squares and single squares, set into blocks of colour, the paintings inescapably resemble architectural models, not least because Egan repeatedly suggests the notion of an internal space, or a space beyond.

The boxes make this idea explicit by wrapping themselves around the space implied by the "windows" in the larger paintings. As ever, the work is immensely accomplished.

The basic unit of form in Taffina Flood's paintings and prints is a block of colour, but it can be and often is an immaterial block - more a block of light than stone, even in one dark painting accurately titled Black Light.

She favours a square format, and in both paintings and carborundum prints, this square is a contested space which adjacent expanses of colour struggle to dominate, or just to hold their place. While there is a great deal of quite intense colour in her work, deep reds, pale and dark blues, yellows and greens, she is actually very measured in her overall use of colour.

In fact, while the show registers strongly in terms of colour, she is very good with grey, and there is a great deal more grey employed than one would suspect at first glance.

Besides which, she generally applies colour in semi-transparent glazes rather than opaque masses, thus helping to maintain qualities of spontaneity and buoyancy in the finished works. The carborundum prints have a denser, more solid feeling than the paintings in this regard. Light positively washes over the paintings.

Flood knows when to leave well enough alone, and never elaborates on a mark once it does its job. Similarly, she leaves traces of the linear underpinning of several compositions showing through. In general, her images wear their evocative titles very convincingly, and there are about 10 works in the show, paintings and prints, that are really outstanding, including the beautiful White Light.

At the Taylor Galleries, George Potter's views of Dún Laoghaire and Dublin Bay in his Dún Laoghaire Suite 2002 have the brisk, bracing clarity of a fresh winter morning (which is not to say that they are all made during the wintertime).

Topographically exact, they break down the clutter of the landscape as it falls towards the harbour into clean, simplified networks of lines and planes, defined by a hard, steady light. Potter is an excellent draughtsman, and his charcoal drawings of statuesque women, clothed or partly nude, are technically polished and crisply made, decisively modelled by bold contrasts of light and shade. They are not academic nudes and they are, for the most part, not portrait studies. In fact, with their props and their chic, impassive distance they would be more obviously at home on a fashion shoot than in the life room.

  Eithne Jordan, Paintings, Rubicon Gallery until December 21st (01- 6708055) Felim Egan, intervals in blue and preludes for abg, Kerlin Gallery until Jauary 4th (01-6709093) Taffina Flood, Paintings and prints, Hallward Gallery until December 9th (01-6621482) George Potter, Dún Laoghaire Suite 2002, Taylor Galleries until December 14th (01-6766055).