The MAC, Belfast Until Oct 13, open 11am-5pm daily

Let’s talk colour, let’s talk bold, confident, extravagant and questioning imagery — then let’s talk Mark McGreevy.

His solo show, running at The MAC in Belfast, is full of drama, colour and questioning imagery that displays influences of various schools of painting and very definitely the hand of Mark McGreevy.

This exhibition may remind you of the Fauvists and the impressionists and you may find yourself asking, ‘Is this intentional? Is the artist having fun with us?’.

The pieces on show, both large and small, are a delight.

I loved the colour placement, the strong, confident brush work and simple compositions leading people around the canvases.

The gallery reminds us: “McGreevy has long been celebrated for offering possible windows into imaginary worlds and distorted realities, creating visual conundrums that imply quizzical and intimate overviews of imagery and speculative spaces.”

Well, that is perfectly true and there are questions to be answered here by the viewer.

The gallery adds: “Flop Sweat is built on McGreevy’s collected archive of personal and found imagery, drawn from the media and everyday experiences.

“These new paintings play with the unquestioned assumptions of taste, landscapes that seem to have been created by the same innocuous actions and activities that appear in his painted realities”.

Yes, they do all of that and more, but it’s the colour that gets you. The colour is dominant and that is what I have taken from this show — that and just a little hint of a humour, a feeling that Mark is playing with us and perhaps art in general.

Art is subjective in the extreme and that’s what makes it wonderful, so your opinion of this show will most probably be very different from mine, but I doubt you’ll find it disappointing.

Flop sweat by definition is a nervous sweat (as of a performer) caused especially by the fear of failing.

That may well be the definition, but Mark McGreevy is certainly not failing with this show.

Elizabeth Baird