Aidan Dunne's Visual Arts.

Reviewed

Callum Innes, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until March 20th (01-6709093)

Maurice Cockrill, Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, until March 10th (01-6777905)

Joe Dunne, Jorgensen Fine Art, Dublin, until March 6th (01-6619758)

David Browne, Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, until March 19th (01-6791548)

The Scottish artist Callum Innes established his reputation by devising a distinctive method of un-painting or, more accurately perhaps, deconstructing painting.

It involves building up with several layers of paint an impassive, minimalist block of flat, dark colour, then systematically dissolving half this expanse of pigment with washes of turpentine. The fractured compositions, juxtaposing neat making and messy unmaking, encapsulate a gamut of pictorial strategies and possibilities, albeit in a fairly austere, Calvinist vein.

Often it is the subtlety of Innes' work that engages you, the surprising richness and range of the colours released from the surface by the action of the solvent, the precisely judged, finely tuned proportions. But it is obviously a limiting approach, inviting the question of where he's going to go from here, not because one has to go anywhere necessarily but because the process is so exclusively focused and predefined that it seems to exclude openness to reinvigoration. In a way that is where Innes is at the moment, in that there are paintings here that are straight enactments of his tried and trusted method.

Interestingly, though, the work does not come across as though it's made by an artist feeling the pressure. There are, as well, examples of novel departures. Monologue Seven, in which veils of variously diluted pigment melt into more resistant masses below, is a beautiful, satisfying painting. The abiding impression is that although Innes likes tight procedural frameworks, they do not define him but demand the selective application of a substantial fund of skills.

For its first solo show the Hillsboro Gallery features a representative selection of the work of the widely respected British artist Maurice Cockrill, now in his 60s. He is a painter, one whose oeuvre is characterised by a consistently high level of attack and engagement.

This show allows us to shuffle briskly through examples of his work over the past two decades or so. The effect is dramatic, because he is not one to settle comfortably into a pictorial idiom and stick with it.

There is a restless, questing quality to his painting even when he is in the thick of a rewarding series of pictures - which is the way he works, in series. A literate, informed, ambitious painter, he is always in the position of negotiating a place for himself. That is, he is effectively trying to answer the implicit question of what painting can be or allow at this moment, in this context. The only given is that it has to happen within the framework of paint and canvas, for he is a traditionalist to that extent.

There is a feeling of almost mathematical rigour to much of what he does, as though, as in those photographs of physicists chalking lengthy equation on blackboards, he is constructing not so much a picture as theory. This impression is bolstered by his use of fast, linear frameworks, evoking various synthetic and organic systems. He has a feeling for colour, form and texture, inclines towards overall or centralised compositions and eschews the facile or the obvious.

Joe Dunne, showing at Jorgensen Fine Art, has moved gradually from meticulous representation to meticulously abstracted representation. His tempera paintings are mostly landscape based, drawing on neatly patterned suburban surroundings and, much less typically, on the coast of north Co Mayo. The compositions are dominated by the vertical and horizontal framework of an implied grid, with diagonal shifts and accents and the occasional foray into curvilinear elements.

Dunne is good with light, space and the rhythmic play of form. His liking for regular, geometric shapes gives the work an architectonic quality, probably better suited to suburbia than countryside, but the Mayo paintings convincingly convey a sense of scale and space, and in at least one, Blowhole, Downpatrick Head, he departs from the norm with interesting effect.

Although it comes across as being indebted to Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series and Ben Nicholson's refined abstracts without surpassing either, his work is accomplished and has an individual voice.

At first glance David Browne's topographical watercolours of Dublin streets are pieces of realism, pure and simple. He favours less obvious, more well-worn aspects of the city, off the beaten track, heterogeneous slices of functional urban landscape. But there is a level of abstraction in his paintings as well. This comes across mostly noticeably in the way he composes his images as complex arrangements of interconnecting geometric forms, something underlined in a previous series of watercolours of boxes. There is also a quality of heightened realism.

Then, the careful, perhaps playful use of details and props in his images indicates a view of the urban environment as being constantly remade and rearranged, despite the venerable look of stained and weathered brick, slate and cement. Disparate elements are unified through their role in the larger fabric of the city. There are no people in his pictures, but we are invited to inhabit their labyrinthine spaces. They are quiet but formidable pieces.