Facing the music of ageing

By T.J. McNAMARA

Close up, the face is a landscape. This concept dominates the work of Fran Marno at the Judith Anderson Gallery until March 22.

One of the pleasures of reviewing art regularly is that you can follow an artist's development towards mature expression. As a student Marno created notable images with powerful thought behind them. At the student galleries and group shows her paintings were close-ups of women's lips, not young women, but middle-aged and elderly women.

She handled the paint so well the pursed lips became a landscape: a Great Rift Valley with folding hills on either side marked by chasms of wrinkles.

The paintings were memorable but somehow not entirely satisfactory. They needed an addition, some hint of memory or metaphor as well as the wrinkles.

In this exhibition called Over There she has taken her concern for the ageing female face several stages further and the result is a great increase in authority, subtlety and force.

She is showing more of the face but depicts the features in a way that is confrontational. The faces are close-up, as if pressed to a window. They are craggy, with the imprint of life on them. Furthermore, they are associated with the things they might be looking at, glimpses of Europe. The fleeting scenes are London, Paris and Venice caught in the way images stay in the memory.

The paintings are divided into tall, narrow panels. Some are plain black, just as memory is selective and many details are forgotten. The division into panels is not just a mannerism, it has a metaphorical function. Other divisions between panels cut across the face, often through the eye, again suggest the selectivity of memory.

The scenes are atmospheric, even when they consist only of a patterned curtain. There is an image of Baroque, curved wrought-iron that suggests the railings of Paris. It is as Paris as the Eiffel Tower but not so cliched. Equally potent are the evocations of London seen from a bus.

Nevertheless, the totality of these splendid paintings is more than the sum of their parts and only limitations of colour inhibit them from totally triumphant success as they make the ageing face more beautiful and meaningful than the smooth skin of youth.

The smooth skin of youth is well to the fore in the exhibition of nude photography by Cindy Wilson, on show at Oedipus Rex Gallery until March 16.

These young women are all Salome. They are the daughters of Herodias and their functions are suggested by half-eaten apples and pomegranates. Proserpine had to stay in hell because she ate a bit of a pomegranate.

Yet the characterisation is limited. All these bodies are uniform. Their lack of individuality is emphasised by the number of them wearing cat masks. It is a relief to see one is pigeon-toed and they are often stylishly dirtied.

Strangely, the photographs work best when they are compressed into a small circular or oval area.

Equally strangely, the two most effective of the big photographs are tucked around the corner in the smaller gallery. One is a woman with a ferret on her head and its eyes, her eyes and her nipples make a curious pattern.

The other, looking like a fashion shot of a woman in a robe looking back, has a poetic quality like Wyatt's famous sonnet:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot stalking in my chamber.