Conceptual art windows into the soul

Despite the bare, puritanical simplicities of conceptual art, skill of hand and tireless industry are still elements that stimulate the wonder of viewers.

These combine with a perceptive eye and extraordinary compositional inventiveness in a show of painting by David Barker, Inside and Beyond, at the Studio of Contemporary Art until April 8.

The title stems from the way Barker allies his fascinating depictions of the texture of walls with windows that allow insight into interior space. The space works in two ways. A distant "beyond" goes past the walls to the lovely colour of his clouded skies. Another space is reflected in the windows, behind the viewer.

These interactions act as metaphors for emotional involvement. Everything is bathed in light and the paintings speak eloquently about the play of light, shadow and reflection.

The subjects - from England, France, Italy, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - are interesting. Sometimes illustrative elements dominate, such as the light through the windows of the Great Cabin of HMS Victory in Portsmouth falling dramatically on the quill pens used by Lord Nelson just before his death.

Balancing this is the painter's outstanding skill in depicting the structure, the curve, the weight and rigging of boats. As a boat builder he knows about these things, and it shows.

Previously, Barker cleared the centre of his paintings and put the incident to the edge of the work. Now, the paintings are stiffened by a decisive vertical somewhere near the centre and the interplay of structure and space occurs around this. Each is carefully constructed.

Other challenges are less formal. To paint a continuous surface that is in bright light and deep shade has always been a challenge which Barker meets wonderfully. His surfaces are studies in the subtle shifts of tone and handling.

The paintings of Venice are particularly notable. The fading terracotta colour of walls is shown in every nuance and contrasted with the glitter of water. This is most striking in Intima. The title comes from a modern poster for underwear stuck near a rubbish bag on a centuries-old wall that also has a poster for an opera by Verdi, hinting at the historic past.

This intriguing wall occupies half of the painting. The other half sweeps into deep space along a canal making the varied surface of the water a contrast with the solidity of the wall. It is hard to say something new about that most painted of cities but this manages it.

The combination of hand and eye works magic everywhere. In Off Cape Brett, rocks appear to move like huge ships in the sweep of the tide, while the lighthouse stands abandoned, but solid. A similar magic is worked in a picture of a lighthouse keeper's house but here it is the fragility of glass and its reflections of sea and horizon that work the alchemy.

Barker's art, instantly recognisable by its virtuoso technique and individual palette of colour, has developed over a long time. This exhibition, like his previous show several years ago, reveals the triumphant authority of maturity.

Great skill in handling of paint has the special quality of being fascinating close-up, although it is meant to be seen from a distance when everything resolves itself as the painter intended. It works with Barker's image-making and it works with the abstract painting of Monique Janson, at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery until the end of this week.

These paintings are a shifting veil of colour, moody and intense when seen from across the gallery. Close-up they are an accumulation of innumerable touches of paint applied by hand. The mind is almost overwhelmed by the intense, concentrated industry required to produce these effects.

This painstaking concentration is even more apparent in a large drawing done in pencil on paper. It shows a little rectangular form linked in columns. Because they are done by hand, these thousands of little elements, though almost exactly similar, show tiny variations which give them life and tension. From any distance the drawing looks like a grey mist on white paper; close-up the eye follows the almost endless permutations with fascination.

The paintings, like much decorative art - even a William Morris wallpaper - have two layers. The inner layer is a shifting, soft background. The front layer is a tightly controlled grid of rhythmic, extraordinarily elaborate chains.

The limitation of these is that there is no closure except at the arbitrary edges of the work. There is no real reason they could not go on forever except the feeling that such precision of hand and concentration of attention must have its limits of endurance.

In her first solo show, The Wanderings, Joanna Langford, at the Michael Lett Gallery until Saturday, also shows skill of hand in making precarious, witty structures that roll on wheels and are shaded by cocktail umbrellas.

These intricate towers with their ladders, platforms and chairs made from slender sticks are inventive in construction and show more potential than her equally fragile towers made of icecream cones, which require fine threads to the ceiling to hold them up.