Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / When the distinguished contemporary Irish painter Robert Armstrong first occupied his space on the third floor of Temple Bar Studios in Dublin 40 years ago, as a co-founder of the complex, the area was subdued and undeveloped, like Soho in the 1970s or Tribeca in the 1980s. Now his studio overlooks a bustling courtyard in what has become a magnet for visitors to the city. In turn, Armstrong himself seems to embrace Ireland’s deep and introverted rootedness as well as its exalted and extroverted role in Western culture while also reaching liberally into other worlds – he has traveled all over, with art in mind, and eagerly plumbed art history – in fluid and delicately gestural canvases that at once fasten onto familiar visual tropes and depart for murkier and more speculative realms. How he manages this tension is, by general description, unsurprising: he makes resolutely abstract paintings that remain firmly underpinned by landscape in line and allusion. He strikes this balance, easier said than done, and even more remarkably sustains it, reflecting a thorough but unobtrusive understanding that, as Colm Toibin puts it in an eloquent essay for a book of Armstrong’s work, “nothing … is free of association.”