Visual Art/Aidan Dunne: Campbell Bruce's paintings are beautifully made. Their subject matter is for the most part the west Cork landscape, but an accompanying note mentions that this is to some extent secondary to the business of pictorial organisation.

Certainly, they are extremely organised paintings, put together with great care and assurance. But pictures that are too well organised can lack a vital spark, which Bruce is an instinctive enough artist to realise. So what he does is never formulaic or pat. There is always a certain openness, a degree of tension, and hence a way for the viewer to enter the work, to become part of its dynamic.

Effectively, land, sea and sky act as a sounding board for the endless action of the weather. Light shines or is muffled, blocked or reflected in endlessly shifting play, so the paintings are intricately patterned arrangements of light, shade and colour. The colour is fresh and striking and includes some radiant sea greens. Several works are predominantly tonal, but Bruce enjoys setting himself problems, doesn’t play safe and isn’t afraid to use colour boldly and well.

There are exceptions, but for the most part the compositions have a horizontal and diagonal emphasis.

While everything is, so to speak, on the surface, integrated in a skin of paint, Bruce relishes spatial complications, setting up myriad planes at various depths and opening up endlessly recessive avenues for the eye.

The tension between pictorial surface and the illusion of depth could be seen as a play on the notional opposition of abstraction and representation. There are several ambitious large compositions, including the set piece Rocks, Sea And Rain. It is a fine show, embodying a wealth of painterly experience.

The dominant image in Paddy Mc-Cann’s paintings is a mask, an ambiguous con that comes with all sorts of meanings, from playful to sinister, attached. What comes across is McCann’s measured, contemplative gaze, characterised by a slowed-down deliberation. It is as if the act of painting is for him a way of zooming in and freezing key moments in time. But, rather than being melodramatic instants, they are quiet periods of inward recollection and realisation. He is a natural painter with a lovely touch. This show, following directly on David Crone’s, makes clear their common ground. They both use paint analytically, carefully to address a fractured reality.

Often, McCann's masks might be bandaged heads, and the images have a therapeutic quality. In a wider sense there is the idea that the painted surface is about healing in some way, not merely covering over. Yet underneath those slow, considered surfaces is something unreconciled or raw, recalling Seamus Heaney's No Man's Land: "Why do I unceasingly/ arrive too late to condone / infected sutures / and ill-knit bone?"

Mark Cullen and Niamh McCann, in their separate installations at Pallas Heights, set out to transform or transcend spaces and contexts. Those spaces are unoccupied flats in Sean Treacy House, a municipal housing block on Buckingham Street. Pallas Studios oversees four flats, using them as studio and exhibition spaces. Cullen's project Cosmic Annihilator could be seen as referring to the disparity between the flats' grandiose-sounding name and the mundane reality, not to mention the fact that the complex will, in time, be literally annihilated.

For the moment he has utterly transformed the interior of one flat. Effectively, by pushing the idea of enclosure to a claustrophobic extreme, creating darkened spaces with limited access, he arrives at the notion of a limitless interior, imaginative space. A circular aperture concentrates the light and points to the endless expanse of outer space. Peer through a slit and you find yourself regarding a landscape of jagged glass that could be a city of light. It’s a disorienting, memorable experience.

McCann offers another kind of disparity in

Katy Simpson's paintings often extend over several panels. Echoed, as she has called her current show, perfectly encapsulates the faded resonance of her images. This sense of distant but emotionally charged recollection is underlined by the spatial intervals that form an integral part of her pictorial vocabulary. Monochromatic panels punctuate the fragmentary glimpses of interiors – and figures. Although she has made figurative images on commission before, the figures here may be regarded as a departure, because her staircases, bedrooms and bathrooms have hitherto evoked presence by absence, calling up the spirits of those we cannot directly see. The spaces are close, intimate, human, inhabited in the sense that they still register the warmth of bodies.

In her understated way Simpson loads her imagery with potential meanings. Doorways, windows and stairs, for example, offer paths to take, moments of decision, ways out or back; telephones suggest the possibility of communication. There is a brooding tenderness and melancholy.

Echo, a two-panel work, is particularly strong. Gillian Lawler's paintings have weathered, eroded surfaces, suggesting a sense of durable presence. A recurrent mound shape, horizon lines and the atmospherics of the pale colours link them to a source in landscape.

They are not depictions of place, but they do evoke a sense of place. It is a very good, assured, restrained body of work, with some outstanding pieces, including No 19 in the catalogue (they are all untitled), with its foreground expanse of pale blue.

Reviewed

Campbell Bruce: Paintings, Solomon Gallery, Dublin, until October 27th (01-6794237)

Paddy McCann: Paintings, Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, until Saturday (01-6777905)

Mark Cullen: Cosmic Annihilator (run ended) & Niamh McCann: <<