Who wants yesterday's papers?

Discarded tabloids and broadsheets are not only picked up by papier maché enthusiasts. Billy Leahy discovers an intriguing exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery

There was a time when yesterday's newspaper found its purpose soaking up the grease and vinegar from a single of chips. Nowadays, however, discarded red-tops and broadsheets have discovered a more artistic bent, providing the raw materials and basis for some interesting works hanging on the walls of Dublin galleries.

In her recent solo show at the Project, for instance, Isabel Nolan exhibited a work comprising a carefully blanked out two-page newspaper spread, entitled 'Available'. A thinly veiled Guardian provided the backdrop, with each chunk of text, advertisement and headline painstakingly covered over with plain, white paper blocks. Artist and musician Mark Swain's current exhibition at the Kerlin similarly puts broadsheet newsprint to good use, as he paints and constructs intricate compositions that emerge from the halftone, ink-dot patterns of the newspaper images (again it appears that the Guardian is the artists' choice for a daily read).

The matted finish of Swain's acrylic paints makes his additions at times hard to distinguish from the source materials on which they are based, as his invented motifs and images blend in and out of their underlying base. The Antrim-born artist adds geometric and almost architectural patterns, abstract shapes and designs to the original image without blanking out the initial material and the information it carries.

This information, however, is not kept entirely intact either, with Swain using it as a starting point for a painterly journey across the page, during which he suggests new meanings and viewpoints with which to approach what was initially present. The language of early 20th century Modernism runs through the works in the guise of clean and formal geometric forms and composition, while elsewhere visual parallels with the work of Albert Oehlen crop up. Although surreal and mostly formally abstract, Swain does hint at interiors, topographic scenes and organic forms that are filled with suggestion and a certain familiarity, but still manage to remain unrecognisable.

The lightness of the painting adds to the aesthetic delicateness of the work, while the apparently haphazard manner in which the underlying systems of newspapers have been pieced together produces an overall air of fragility. This helps the work to invite the viewer into Swain's personal environment and journey through his unnatural and ethereal landscapes. At first sight, it is easy to categorise the works as a combination of collage and painting, but there is little layering in the works, despite their lack of transparency.

This intimate physical proximity that the viewer is pulled into perhaps mirrors the manner of Swain's own production of the mostly small-scale works, in which original elements of the newsprint are absorbed and blended into his painted additions. Rather than trying to decipher the works, we are being asked to respond to the images and motifs at an instinctive and almost intuitive level, much in the way Swain seems to unconsciously distort the printed image through his painting.

Through this interpretation by Swain, we are confronted with reordering of information to respond to – something that can be often troublesome given that the works avoid a coherent outward logic, preferring to keep the rationale on the inside – rather than a humble single of chips.

? More Tony Swain, You Have Decorated Me the Wrong Colour 29 April-28 May, Kerlin Gallery, Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin 2. www.kerlin.ie