Writing about some key works of the Minimalist movement, Frank Stella's monochromatic stripe paintings, in the 1960s, critic Brian O'Doherty described the artist, rather disapprovingly, as "the Oblomov of art . . . the master of ennui". Sean Shanahan's exceptionally spare paintings, at the Kerlin Gallery, make Stella's stripes look like baroque extravaganzas by comparison, but Shanahan is not a Minimalist - at least not within the meaning of the act. Each work consists of just one monochrome rectangle demarcated against a smooth, uncoloured MDF support.
The interaction between painting and ground has long been a live issue in his work, never more so than when he paints on the singularly unforgiving support of sheet steel, and there are a couple of those in the show, but the MDF pieces seem to develop the debate considerably with their generous expanses of colour. These impassive colour blocks are not, in Minimalist terms, primary forms.
One salient feature of Stella's stripes was their all-over quality, and Shanahan's works do not feature all-over compositions. They are not symmetrical. In them, colour rectangles intrude into the compositional rectangle from the right. In several, a vertical line incised into the wood seems to mark out the limits of the colour. Looking at them is a peculiar experience. On the one hand, with their painterly spareness and even surfaces, they are objects of contemplation, paintings that positively calm their environment. But they are also inherently unstable. The eye doesn't settle on them. Rather, you have to constantly renegotiate your way into them which makes for very lively viewing, especially given their minimal, but never Minimal, presence.
The second law of thermodynamics has a unique status not only in science but also in the arts, though it is but one of three. The best known translation of the triad into non-technical language is simplicity itself: You can't win, you can't break even and you can't get out of the game - rules that demolish the fallacies of, respectively, capitalism, socialism and religion. And that, in broad terms, is the import of Tina O'Connell's in Dublin, in which she casts a cold eye on the phenomenal wave of development currently sweeping over Dublin city.
in Dublin, the work that encapsulates this observation is, appropriately, sited in a quiet corner of old Dublin, the Barley Mow in Francis Street, a pub caught briefly between incarnations. With its furniture and fittings, even its taps, still in place, the Barley Mow might be renamed the Marie Celeste. But look at the TV screen in the corner and you see not Eurosport but a CCTV image of another part of the pub, a room upstairs in which a big blob of bitumen, a startling, alien presence in a faded domestic parlour, oozes at an incredibly slow pace through a hole in the floor. From the ceiling below it forms a startling, slick black column and accumulates on the floor in a great mass, gradually spreading out to lap at the edges of the bar and the seats. The glossy surface looks impossibly perfect and distinctly sinister in the way it slowly, almost imperceptibly, invades the space.
IN its brief history to date, Pallas Studios in Foley Street has, in the manner of Temple Bar, been more than working space for younger artists. PreMillenial Tension Where's My Brief? is the third group exhibition organised and sited there. The show has a rough and ready quality - hardly surprising, given that it was put together with minimal resources and what looks like a great deal of hard work. But the roughness is useful, and lends it an edge. It is not, though, particularly thematic. In a note the four selectors rationalise their dilution of the initial, and surely satisfactory, title. Hence the where's my brief? bit. They are left with a miscellaneous group show.
Nevertheless, some pieces do have a millennial resonance, including Sarah Carroll's film installation with its intimations of Titanic-like disaster. A comparable note of anxiety is evident in Clodagh Emoe's salmon with an asthma inhaler in its mouth, and Gavin Corcoran's strange biomorphic foam versions of children's knotted balloon sculptures. Other appealing if not particularly pertinent works are Katie Holten's Proposal Paper, a huge dispersed mass of crumpled sheets of paper, David Timmons's blank wall unit, Sandra Meehan's text on identity, Orla Whelan's abstracted landscapes with broad swathes of colour - well-tried terrain, but they have something fresh going for them - and Mark Cullen's I Can See For Miles on the relativity of scale.
Still Life at the Paul Kane Gallery marshals work by four artists. M.J. Lahaye's undemanding, strongly coloured paintings nod towards Matisse, with a quirky, modern twist. Meriel Nicoll's agitated brushwork, a stylistic mannerism, can't compensate for the lack of more substantial pictorial ideas. Lidia de Lange's images are illustrative and decorative. They are agreeable enough, but they could be a little sharper. The best things in the show, Deirdre Nolan's fine black-and-white drawings, delirious swirls of pattern, have a textural lushness, and an authority, unmatched by her colour work.
Carmel Mooney, at the Hallward Gallery (she is simultaneously showing work at Gallery 27 in London) has long been inspired by volcanoes. Her show, From The Dark Earth, includes passages of descriptive painting and more stylised, symbolic accounts of fissures opening in the earth. She is evidently wary of becoming too involved in description, and indeed a certain tightness of handling does inhibit her most descriptive images. But the same could be said of the more self-consciously symbolic pieces, and the best works, including the title painting, plus Study From The Edge II and Winter Crater, manage to maintain a comfortable balance between representation and stylisation.
Sean Shanahan is at the Kerlin Gallery until April 26th. Tina O'Connell's in Dublin can be seen at Barley Moe, 92-93 Francis Street until April 3rd, between noon and 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. daily. PreMillenial Tension is at Pallas Studios, 17 Foley St until April 5th. Still Life is at the Paul Kane Gallery until April 17th. From The Dark Earth is at the Hallward. Gallery until April 8th.
