PAUL DORAN @ GREEN ON RED

Paul Doran is most famous for a series of work that took a love of impasto effects to the level of extreme sport, burying the canvas in a rich heap of brashly swept oil-paint. His new work by comparison feels incredibly sedate at first. Reminiscent of Howard Hodgkin, Dorans fractured little abstractions recall landscape painting in their humid greens and beizes, in almost all of the pieces on show here, the surface is animated by stuttering dark marks which in most cases form a kind of frame around the central action, consisting mainly of interlocking triangles. The muddied colours open up over time as the product of garish synthetic colours which survive in tiny flashes of mottled magenta, emerald and lemon at the edge of brushstrokes. Overall a subtle and clever show but not that exciting at the same time.



Paul Doran - Untitled

BREDA LYNCH @ GALWAY ARTS CENTRE

The video was kinda cool, I thought it was Lydia Lunch, rolling all over convention in some LES pit. It wasn't, it was Siouxsie Sioux, probably on TOTP.

I dunno, maybe its my ambivalence about Goth Girls in general, but I thought this show stank. Whether its Lynch's overly mannered drawing style, or the general portentous mopiness it all felt, facile? Gauche?

There is one highlight, a big lilac wall with "I ♥ Siouxsie" emblazoned across the top, its kinda cool, like what a teenage girl would do if she was given a wall in a gallery. Unfortunately Lynch doesn't take anymore cues from teenage girl's decorating schemes and the rest of the exhibtion feels too neat, the tasteful emptiness of the walls echoing the vacancy of the stuff that actually interrupted the yawning space. Sticking some popstar's face on a cat coulda been cute if the drawings themselves didn't command such a huge amount of gallery real estate. Also there are some pictures of Goth Girls, its probably about identity being performed or something, whatevs.

TERRY WINTERS @ IMMA

Signal to Noise is the name IMMA's curators have chosen for their recent retrospective of the painters last ten years. Held in the same wing of the museum that has over the last few years hosted large retrospectives for Juan Úsle and Howard Hodgkin and, like them, Winters has a canny knack for sublimating imagery into his large, dense compositions. According to the press release: "The 40 paintings and drawings explore the cerebral spaces of information technology and issues of cognition and narration as they relate to abstract painting." The exhibition barely makes a strong case for its premise, as shapes, figures, motifs and patterns are reintroduced remodelled, rearticulated and eventually dismantled through the painters brash and probing brushwork.

Not that it starts that promisingly, the first paintings we see are of more modest size and their tentative games with alternating narration of positive and negative space, seems like a big commotion over not much. The ideas of space articulated just aren't interesting enough to sustain the bombastic streaks of paint that criss-cross the canvases.

But then something changes, we move into the smaller rooms, where monochrome prints display a nice feel for placement, a certain crude brashness which is effective in ways it doesn't seem to be in paint. the rough scribble that he uses in place of hatching has a childlike charm and a crooked violence. The sheer number of them on the wall forces the curators point about information systems in overload but its obviousness is effective in a way that echos the prints themselves.



Terry Winters - In Blue

Suddenly the large canvases reappear, but this time, in such wild colour that they seem garish and overwhelming even without being rammed together from floor to ceiling. Mainly composed of large floating grids of rose-like configurations of space and spirograph designs. In the larger pieces the variations of the rose patterns bursts into three dimensions as they push and pull against each other and the picture plane, swirling around each other.

MARK SWORDS @ KEVIN KAVANAGH

Mark Swords latest show at Kevin Kavanagh, according to the blurb: "displays an increasingly intuitive engagement with various approaches to painting and art making." What emerges at the show, rather than a ludic free-wheeling playfulness, rather a wondrous enchantment with a sort of playful dissection. Motifs from manky bits of carpet and fabric are carefully dissected and rearticulated through paint, collage, embroidery etc. A rich awkardness pervades the show, which feels like the perspiration of a painter realising in front of you how tricky the project he has set for himself as he teases out the pictorial strands that comprise the various paintings on show (his literate yet neurotic style also provides a brilliant foil for the few flashes of wanton bravura!)



Mark Swords - Carpet

The first painting that welcomes you obliquely is Carpet, which like all the other pieces on show is of modest size. Riffing on tension between the pattern of a patch of carpet and a Heilmann-esque zig-zagging design, Swords interrelates each element of the painting in such a brittle agitated way, the painting teeters on the brink of resolution and as such provides an excellent point of entry for a show that creates more itches than it scratches.