Although she is inspired by the example of Mondrian to regard her compositions as geometric constructs, the painterly process of the Irish artist Martina O'Brien quickly dissolves overt geometry in atmospherics akin to those of Turner and Constable, in her canvases on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from June 3 through 24. (Reception Thursday, June 5, from 6 to 8 PM.)

A strong sense of landscape and seascape provide a phantom armature for O'Brien's ostensibly abstract compositions, which invariably evoke intermingling clouds, mists, and watery expanses in a manner reminiscent of the ethereally floating vistas of classical Chinese scrolls, albeit very much in the tradition of Western painting and fortified by the rich heft and depth of oils on canvas.

Trained at Dun Laoighaire College of Art and Design and The National College of Art and Design, O'Brien is "a painter's painter," possessed of remarkable technical finesse, which puts at her disposal an arsenal of dazzling effects. A consummate colorist, she employs a seemingly infinite range of blues, grays, and browns to conjure up shimmering panoramas of air, light, and liquescent reflections, in which craggy rock formations and land masses rise here and there out of the primordial mist like humpbacked whales or shadowy sea monsters.

To endow her paintings with physical presence, O'Brien applies thick layers oil impasto with a brush, then scrapes the canvas with a palette knife, creating tactile ridges of pigment that impart to their surfaces distinct vertical and horizontal structures, which stabilize her freely flowing forms in the manner of a grid, reminding us that her paintings are autonomous aesthetic entities rather than mere illusions of reality.

On one level, then, O'Brien's paintings are the most materially palpable of art objects, with their encrusted pile-up of pigmentation evoking the very substance of the Irish earth more in the manner of surrogates than representations. On another level, however, her compositions are the most ethereal of things, evoking elusive nuances of light and air that can transport the viewer as readily as any romantic landscape of the past by virtue of their atmospheric qualities and sensitivity to the salient particulars of natural phenomena.

Like Constable, who declared, "No two days are alike, not even two hours," O'Brien evokes, from painting to painting, a sense of fleeting facets of weather occurring in time, even as her primary focus appears to be on creating a formal statement in contemporary aesthetics, expressing the postmodern duality that manifests in the tantalizing tension between abstract form and subject matter.

While O'Brien's landscapes appear quintessentially Irish, invested with all the poetry, myth, and romance that we associate with that fabled country, they are, in fact, almost equally informed by impressions culled from her travels in China, Vietnam, India and the Middle East. Thus they are actually universal composites filled with a timeless allusiveness, finally transcending the particulars of any one locale yet possessed of a striking unity of surface.

Although some titles, such as "Where Connamera Meets the Atlantic" and "Kenmare Bay," allude to specific places, others such as "Soft Waters Ebb and Flow," and "Cradle of Illumination" express the overall poetic magnitude of the artistic vision of Martina O'Brien, whose paintings grace several important collections in Ireland and seem a sure bet to achieve an enthusiastic following in the United States as well.

Image Credits: Tide Upon Tide, Late Afternoon, Brittas Bay, Oil on Canvas, 27.5" x 27.5"