FERGUS FEEHILY @ DOUGLAS HYDE

If there was a driving force behind my recent gallery trip this was it. I first came across Fergus Feehily when he gave a workshop at my art school. It was only with retrospect that I realised how lucky I was to have been there for it as he has since become one of my most admired artists and definitely a major touchstone for the work I have since done. Also Douglas Hyde Gallery has been unbelievable over the last year or so, and while I'm gutted I missed their recent Raoul De Keyser (a major painter in my estimation) show of watercolours, recent enough exhibitions by Karin Mamma Andersson and Miroslav Tichy have been impressively curated and just, really nice to look at.

So its really difficult to get outside of my own perspective on this guy who since I've obsessed over his work, ripped it off and pretty much forced everyone who'll sit still for long enough to look at jpegs of his stuff on my laptop and, as if the fates had organised it, sat at the bottom of the stairs were a bunch of art students with their tutor, seemingly to remind me of why other ppl might not like them. The major theme among the naysayers that I gathered from my not-so-subtle eavesdropping was that the work on show "just didn't really seem like much."

I mean, Douglas Hyde is a big space, with hugely high ceilings an just masses of walls. And Feehily's work is, well, small. Assembled from scraps of wood, assorted paper, fabric, photographs and delicate, tentative passages of painting, it bears a lot of the hallmarks of what Raphael Rubinstein terms "Provisional Painting" in the much talked about recent Art in America feature. And yet the paradox of Feehily's work is that these works, while handmade, sparse and assembled with all their seams showing, are also sumptuous, multi-faceted and jewel-like.

Its pretty hard to articulate on a verbal level the way the tiny jokes, idiosyncratic details and sly formal playfulness all add up to something more and how beautifully the large white walls of Douglas Hyde are utilised so that these events are allowed to register despite their modesty. There's one painting just inside the door, where the frame is cut, presumably assembling two cheap secondhand frames, so that one edge is twice as thick as the other two. It takes a second to register but when it does, it registers as a kind of inward smile. Another painting exploits an extraordinary resonance of colour between of casually daubed pink paint on baby pink card.

Like I said, its pretty hard to verbalise precisely, but these paintings set off a reaction in me like Dougal opening the advent calender in Father Ted, it might not even matter what new detail is unveiled, but it sets off a kind of giddy impulse when a flash of pink from the side of a canvas re-energises the whole painting. They definitely feel like the work of someone who takes a kind of excessive joy in the nuts and bolts of painting. Each painting feels like a series of parcels to be opened, each detail unveils itself in such a way that that comparison just feels really right to me.

And on top of that there's the catalogue. Douglas Hyde always produce high end fetish object catalogues for their exhibitions and Feehily is the author of a number of artists's books. Sure I couldn't afford to eat lunch after buying this, but it kept me smiling all the way home on the bus, and hopefully it will be enough to stave off making a return visit before this exhibition ends in a weeks time. Yeah, that's how much time you have left to see this.