VISUAL ARTS: Greyscale/CMYK, RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, until April 27th (01-6612558). Laura Gannon: Wordsong, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, until May 18th (01-8741903). Ronnie Hughes: Lines Of Desire, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, until April 19th (048-90321402).
With the demise of modernism, there was a view that influence would devolve from the traditional artistic centres to the periphery, that new alliances would be forged in the midst of an emergent pluralism. Needless to say, things haven't quite worked out like that. But Greyscale/CMYK is a bid to nudge things in that direction. In uniting works from Ireland, Scotland and the Nordic countries, it strings together several alternative centres of arts activity around the erstwhile Parisian hub. All of these places have seen flowerings of the visual arts, though nobody would claim they share an artistic identity.
That said, nothing jars very much in the show, and there are some surprising similarities. The title, based on graphic-design terminology, indicates two shows in one, organised on the basis of work in black and white (greyscale) and colour (CMYK), a principle that might seem arbitrary and idiosyncratic to the point of eccentricity but is intended as a comment on the futility of a thematic approach.
If an overall tone emerges, you would have to describe it in terms such as guarded and tentative. If you're looking for, say, exuberant inventiveness, generous engagement, you will not, on the whole, find it here. There are many small gestures, asides, marginalia, playful or ironic interventions, but not a lot that speaks of great confidence or expansiveness. But then it should be said that an undercurrent of doubt or anxiety is par for the course in a lot of what you'll find internationally.
But it is a perfectly good, interesting group show with a few dramatic notes, including, conspicuously, Ross Sinclair's big flag installation. There is much architectonic work, with references to visionary, utopian or just plain bad urban planning and design and, by extension, a recurrent concern with the nature of public and private spaces. It's just possible that a lot of this might have to do with access to computer-aided design as much as with theoretical preoccupations. Certainly, there is a sense of computer programs feeding into the work.
Film and video are strong. J Tobias Anderson's dramatically compressed version of North By Northwest, Katerina Lofstrom's luminous, animated painting, Clare Langan's post-apocalyptic trilogy and Salla Tykka's brilliant Power are all more than worth seeing, and especially the latter two. Tykka's brief, intense work grabs you with a compelling introductory caption and doesn't let you go.
Laura Gannon's exhibition Wordsong is disappointing because it sets out to treat a potentially fruitful area but does little with it. Going by the four film installations that make up the show, it relates to our use of words in thought and speech, as a means of articulating the self and in communication.
We first encounter a woman in pale make-up who waves rather awkwardly at us for some time. Her stilted movement may be a communicative gesture but, equally, she may be obsessively cleaning a window.
A recurrent problem is that Gannon does not seem to have strong visual or dramatic ideas, and time and again her theatrical tableaux come across as too banal and nondescript. A woman caresses her face frantically while we hear the word "mine" reiterated in crescendo; in potentially the strongest piece, a man and a woman occupy adjoining screens and never quite manage to communicate; a man, viewed from the back, repeatedly bends his head and torso away from us. He is, we are informed, declining to communicate. All the performers are very good-looking, and giving them a few minute's attention apiece is to that extent painless. But Gannon doesn't add much to this basic exchange. High production values alone cannot make up for such shortcomings.
In theory, programming a show of painting at the same time and in the same gallery as a show of lens-based work by one of the most fashionable artists around sounds tough on the painter. But in the event the juxtaposition tends to confirm that good painting is a lot more interesting to look at than big glossy photographs, whatever their virtues.
To move from the hurly-burly of Phil Collins's impromptu reportage to Ronnie Hughes's show Lines Of Desire is to slow down your eye and put your mind in gear. The surfaces of Hughes's paintings are slow, thoughtful and beautifully coloured. In Bloomglow, a big, thickly brushed, predominantly grey diptych, your eyes gradually accommodate the layer on layer of texturally embedded forms that echo the immediately visible ones. All of them - typically lozenges, rings, coils - make up a self-contained family but don't close off the outside world. In fact, they suggest any number of things in the world, but in an easy, unforced way. There is something musical about the mellow play of elements in all this.
Hughes is a disciplined but generous painter. One of the most recent paintings, Duoslope, introduces edges to the erstwhile boundless expanse of the picture space. There is hardly anything in this painting, but it is extraordinarily rich in terms of optical and tactile qualities and of tension between space and surface.
