Space to explore

Billy Leahy looks at Philip Allen's collection of new works at the Kerlin Gallery

Images of the idyllic, undulating countryside of landscape art is not something that immediately suggests itself when faced with a Phillip Allen painting. With angular, geometric planes jutting and winging their way across his works, creating a cosmic sense of spatial depth, the hyper-traditional field of landscape painting seems light years away. But despite first impressions, it is the time-honoured discipline of painting that lies at the core of Allen's work.

Currently, the Kerlin Gallery is hosting Allen's first solo exhibition in this country, after first introducing him to an Irish audience just over two years ago in a tantalising three-person show shared with Diana Cooper and Paul McDevitt. This time, around 11 of Allen's works have been given the run of the whole gallery as they explore and develop conventional artistic methods and amalgamate familiar processes and themes such as abstraction and landscape elements.

Allen brings a strange sense of the three-dimensional to the canvas, creating an imagined space framed at the top and bottom by clusters of oil globule rosettes, whose saccharine form is floral and also quite sculptural. The borders give a clear indication as to one of Allen's objectives: to examine the qualities and texture of oil paint and to investigate the complex relationship between material and surface. There is also a strong suggestion that the artist's palette is present in the bulbous and encrusted borders, which brings the element of materiality of the paint itself and, most importantly, the origins of painting into a new area of consideration.

Between these borders of thick, tactile impasto, Allen's canvases are spatially layered, with the background mix of scraped paint, drips and half-executed lines and motifs providing the base for the construction of a three-dimensional, illusionary space. The background is intrinsically interesting, but can be initially overlooked due to the more attention-grabbing spatial planes which emerge from its slightly sullied and sloppy emptiness.

These spokes of light and geometric lines that emerge from the central void or vanishing point add movement and perspective by shadowing and superseding each other in a disciplined and constructed manner. There is a definite fun element to the works, with cartoonist speech bubbles, day-glo colours and animated clouds appearing through the show.

This perhaps follows on from the process-driven method employed by Allen, which is to use multi-coloured felt-tip pen drawings as the basis for each piece. Continuous sketching and doodling on A5 paper allow him to toy and experiment with the three-dimensional aspect before committing to canvas, while the small scale also reflects the limited size of the majority of Allen's paintings.

Many of the patterns and forms reoccur throughout Allen's work, with the Art Deco-esque sunbeams and bright minimal dots becoming almost signature designs. At times these beams stretch out over the edge of the paintings, producing an unexpected element of interruption in the works while also alluding to the extension of the work into real space.

This, however, seems to be a very subtle suggestion and certainly no real tension emerges from this idea. Rather, the main spatial tension is reserved for the relationship between the protruding, sculptural borders, which give a real physical depth to the work, and the illusionary depth of the central area, where we are constantly visually aware of its actual flatness. And all this without a single blade of grass or rolling hillside in sight.

?More Continues until 8 October. www.kerlin.ie. Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin 2. 01 670 9093