The main visual arts offering in this year's Belfast Festival is Places in Mind, three complementary takes on landscape by three artists. It is a fine, well-designed show that ranges through painting, photography film and video. Canadian Stan Douglas's schematic Nu-tka is based on the convergence of Spanish and English colonisers in Nootka Sound in the 18th century. Two overlapping commentaries and images drift in and out of sync as the colonisers' imposed narratives and views intersect in the reality of the wild landscape.
Adam Chodzko's Nightvision, seen at the Project in Dublin earlier this year, culminates in a nice coup de theatre and consists otherwise of a long, engaging preamble as several lighting technicians set out to transform our view of a dark, wet forest.
Elizabeth Magill shows further episodes in her exploration of post-modern landscape. Her moody vistas are half-Friedrich, half-Hollywood, and she simultaneously celebrates and undercuts painting's illusionistic potential by emphasising that "clouds" are in fact pools of diluted pigment, or that stars are party glitter sprinkled across the surface. Yet, paradoxically, as in the work of Luc Tuymans or Peter Doig, out of this assemblage of composite sources and guarded scepticism, something surprisingly affective and un-ironic emerges. As though the problematic spaces that Magill contrives turn out to be occupied by residues of real feeling.
Sean McSweeney, at the Fenderesky, confirms the resilience of a traditional approach to landscape. His attentive tracking of a familiar terrain through seasons and weathers produces images with the bracing, sharp clarity of sudden exposure to cold country air. In a way there is nothing new in his exploration of a watery bogland world, yet he always brings something fresh and intelligent to the process, always manages to surprise us and never rests on his laurels, and there are some terrific pictures in the show.
Margaret O'Sullivan, exhibiting sea and landscapes at the Paul Kane Gallery, shows great spirit in committing herself to straight, unadorned descriptions of waves breaking on the shore. Technically, there is nowhere for the artist to hide in pictures that aim to convey a transient but familiar phenomenon, and on the whole she does very well, never resorting to formula, always trusting her eyes. Jane Byrne, who makes up the other half of the show, makes abstractions from landscape. Her oils on paper are better, and freer, than the more stilted works on canvas.
Martin Mooney at the Solomon is a very capable, and a very popular painter who continues, rather than pastiches, a tradition of 19th century realism in landscape studies of Ireland and Italy, and in still life. In his self-consciously classicised views, Venice, Dublin and Morocco tend to be strangely interchangeable. But that has more to do with the level of formalism he chooses to work at than anything else.
And, to his credit, there is no contrived nostalgia in his treatment of Dublin, for example. He just looks for angles that display the essential architectural character of the city. A formalised quality is even more apparent in the still lifes.
The paintings of Scottish artist Callum Innes, at the Kerlin Gallery, are impeccably made, and then impeccably unmade. Innes lays down monolithic blocks of black oil pigment on plain white grounds and then proceeds to dissolve and wash away half the blocks with turpentine. It sounds as if it should be a messy process, and at certain stages it must be fairly messy, but he is a meticulous perfectionist and each finished piece is crisply and cleanly articulated, free of the slightest blemish.
At first glance the works could be straightforward minimalist abstracts, but the dawning realisation that something funny is going on entices us into a closer engagement with the surface. Once we begin to look, it becomes apparent that each black has its own distinctive range of hues, which become visible as the colour is washed out, leaving the residue of its constituent elements. Innes is doing what he does very well. The paintings are beautiful and conceptually neat. Their self-contained, formulaic precision does make you wonder how he's going to advance from here, but he is a resourceful artist and advance he will.
