Freedom in restraint

Billy Leahy samples the emptiness of place in Maureen Gallace's second solo exhibition on the ideas of landscape and home

It happened. Maybe it was always going to happen. But doors and windows have appeared in clear, bold, unapologetic form. And, if that wasn't shocking enough, somewhere among the seven, still relatively bare, landscape paintings by Maureen Gallace in the Kerlin, a telegraph pole brazenly juts into view. Small, easily overlooked details – but in the context of Gallace's low-incident, minimal career oeuvre, these are surprisingly brash additions.

Once there was a time when the houses populating Gallace's small-scale works were mere geometric shapes, more abstract than figurative, with everything whittled down and reduced to its purest form. Gallace's subject matter has always been condensed, with the detail pared away to create works that toyed with visual abstraction and the idea of painterly representation. The images were almost entirely based around her own memories and experiences of the landscapes and houses situated in leafy Connecticut suburbs and seaside homes in Cape Cod.

This has been the case since the winter of 1996, when Gallace returned to Monroe in Connecticut where she grew up, to realise a series of drawings and photographs of the town and the surrounding area. With all places clearly engraved in her memory revisited, Gallace went back to New York to produce a series of formal paintings based on her trip.

The images conveyed in the works were usually the same – a house, bare, luminous and closed - and quickly brought her critical acclaim on an international level. Doorless and windowless, the house, serenely situated, seemed to be concealing its own secrets, perhaps distorted through the passing of time and the unreliability of memory.

For a long time, however, there has been a gradual development in Gallace's paintings – the buildings, once indistinguishable from each other, have formed their own personality and features, with the unknown landscapes slowly morphing into recognisable scenes. For an artist who once explained how important the level of abstraction was in her work, claiming this allowed them to be read as being about the idea of "landscape", the idea of "home" and the idea of "painting", the wearing down of this is a major development, if an immensely measured one.

It had been coming. Windows have previously interrupted the plain walls of Gallace's houses, but they have been uncertain of themselves, remorseful even, as if their anonymity was being threatened. Motifs formerly seen in Gallace's paintings such as a bridge arching over a road in Driving to Connecticut, Christmas Eve are repeated in the Kerlin show, but the lines are now cleaner and more defined.

The works, as a result, have lost their "somewhere-anywhere-everywhere" universal appeal – but they have gained in other areas. The sombre and muted shades of the palette have been fortunately left unaltered, while the unpopulated landscapes are only broken by a self-portrait which launches the seven-piece Kerlin show. The addition of detail and stronger elements brings Gallace's work forward and helps renew the viewer's interest in the repetitive primary experience detailed in her paintings and to find freedom, as she continues to do, in restraint.

?More Maureen Gallace at the Kerlin Gallery, South Anne St, Dublin 2 until 2 July. www.kerlin.ie, 01 6709093