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Steadfastly dealing with his own 'here and now', Neo Rauch, who lives and works in Leipzig, presented in the Douglas Hyde Gallery a vision that was as distinctive as it was bleak. The landscape of former East Germany as portrayed by Rauch is bland and startlingly devoid of humanity. The paintings on display were from the Deutsche Bank Collection and comprised a variety of scales. Despite this, the works had an unsettling uniformity of vision, strengthened by the distinctive visual language Rauch employs. A visual code more typically at home with early twentieth-century political propaganda painting, Rauch's use of it is beyond the merely reminiscent, it is a pointed adaptation. A flat approach to colour and an illustrative use of line, both readily associated with commercial graphics, are in Rauch's work employed to perpetuate confused and confusing perspectives. The paintings do not lack depth; they confound it, presenting a variety of spatial planes within each work, with relative scale of depiction similarly disjointed. The unease contingent to Rauch's vision is emphasised in his choice of imagery: half-built roads, deserted apartment blocks, uninteresting gallery spaces, desolate cafés, girders, the stuff of building construction. These visual emblems, long since synonymous with societal progress, render the littering of human presence in the paintings either dwarfed to insignificance in the face of larger ideologies (for example in Ausstellung , 1997) or inhuman in their efforts to embody such ideals (such as the icons in Weiche , 1999). It seems as if Rauch has remarked upon a place and time in a language that evokes a chilling post-war memory but is, in fact a dystopian view of the collective present, one that left this writer cold.

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Far removed from the cool concerns of urban progress was the work of Maureen Gallace at the Kerlin. Compact and painterly, her works explore a very different nostalgia to Rauch's. Snapshot views of Connecticut and Cape Cod form the basis of the rural scenes Gallace has rendered in clean firm painted strokes. Private moments and personal memories are translated through the location of their association, revealed in titles such as Driving home to Connecticut , Christmas ice storm , Beach Road . There are no people in these vignettes, only suggestions of presence and the implication of travel. Moving to and from places through memory was the inspiration for these works. Though at risk of seeming slight, these works were, in the main, poignant in their focused deceptive simplicity. Given the technical confidence of the paintings, it was annoying rather than augmentative that the corners at the top of some of the works were left unpainted. No doubt this was intended to point to the process of painting; however, the blank triangular spaces were intrusive and undermined the integrity of the works. In a critical climate presently obsessed with the 'process of process', let's pretend, just for a moment, that finished work is not necessarily to be denied, a notion to which the quality of Gallace's painting clearly attested.

Top: Noel Sheridan: Missing it , performance, RHA Gallagher Gallery; courtesy the artist
Bottom: Maureen Gallace: Woods Hole, Cape Cod, MA , 2001, oil on canvas, 28 x 36 cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery