Art:Eyes wide open

An accurate reproduction of a photograph raises questions for contemporary art but Billy Leahy discovers a new way of 'seeing' at Paul Winstanley's exhibition

Two-and-a-half years ago, nature peered and appeared through the windows in Paul Winstanley's first solo exhibition in Ireland. Nordic forests were rigidly framed by stark interiors and shrouded by net curtains, which obscured and clouded nature's set. This forested landscape seemed in most cases to be a backdrop to the British painter's typically utopian, clean-lined pavilion rooms.

For his second solo exhibition in Dublin's Kerlin gallery, entitled Homeland, Winstanley has discarded these devices, presenting us with three seemingly unconcealed landscape paintings and two interior works of a walkway lit-up at night. These highly detailed and superrealist works are typical of Winstanley's painting style of photorealism – realist paintings, with an enormous and specific commitment to detail, which usually employ photographs as the starting point of the work.

Photorealism itself is a style of painting that has courted controversy since it first came to prominence in the 1960s. Often readily dismissed, it is practiced by only a small number of current artists: Chick Close, Richard Estes and Gerhard Richter being Winstanley's main contemporaries. This superrealist style – Winstanley's paintings from even a short distance could easily be mistaken for photographs – raises questions over figurative painting's place in contemporary art, as well as the basic aim of what many believe is just an accurate reproduction of a photographed image.

The artist has previously offered an explanation for this choice of style, rationalising that his paintings deal with the nature of the image and the transformation of meaning that occurs when an image finds form in a new and sometimes unexpected media. Winstanley adopts the visual language of photography creating minimal, undifferentiated surfaces with a subdued palette.

Through this aesthetic an implicit association between imagery and surface is created, which in turn can lead to a shift in the relationship between the viewer and painting. The sterile and melancholic settings depicted seem abandoned and unused, but hold an air of impending activity. This sensation creates an undercurrent of disquiet, tension and suspense heightened by the viewer's meditation on the nature of seeing.

This disquiet can be seen in the pair of 'Night Walkway' paintings in the Homeland exhibition, which were typical Winstanley works and a personal highlight of the show. The two depictions of a glass-wall corridor lit by strip lighting are both fantastically produced, with reflective layers building onto each other, while the central glow focuses the monochrome painting. The layers of reflection, central glow and the almost identical nature of the two works force us to contemplate the composition of the images more closely.

The two large landscape works in Homeland see Winstanley again toy with our perception and this very nature of seeing. On one hand he has dropped his previous framing and containing of the exterior landscape with the order created by the straight line of an interior space, but we still seem to be viewing the work through a veil. The slight blurred definition of the two Birch works – more so than in the smaller scale 'Little Finland' piece – suggests the viewer may well still be on the inside looking out. Winstanley, however, has refused to comment on this aspect, preferring, well, to leave it open to the viewer.

Paul Winstanley until 23 April at the Kerlin Gallery, South Anne St, Dublin 2