Making it back to the Futures

VISUAL ART:There is evidence of the handmade in a group exhibition at the RHA , while new paintings at the Green on Red gallery are engrossing

THE SEVEN ARTISTS in Futures at the RHA share “a fascination with making” say the show’s curators, Patrick T Murphy and Ruth Carroll. “With each artist the nuance of the handmade and in some cases the homemade is evident.”

There are seven artists in Futures, so it's not really big enough to be a survey show. In these trying times survey shows are certainly becoming popular – Noughties but Niceat the Limerick City Gallery, to name but one – and perhaps in suggesting a common preoccupation Murphy and Carroll are hinting that the show they've selected does say something about the spirit of the age.

Let’s start with the title. Rewind time almost 100 years and the Italian Futurists, currently the subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern, were embracing the promise of a mechanised, technological and, it must be said, violent future with irrational and misguided zeal. Even a cursory glance confirms that the featured artists in Futures are altogether more cautious and critical in their outlook.

Seamus Nolan’s work fits firmly under the heading of relational aesthetics, hinging as it does on intervention, direct engagement and social, political and ethical issues. It’s as likely, or more likely, to turn up as a subject of discussion on Joe Duffy or in the news pages of the papers as it is in conventional visual arts media outlets.

His Futurespiece revisits an earlier, contentious Project display (he's currently showing a filmed re-enactment of a public hearing on the Corrib gas pipeline at Project), featuring the hammers used by protesters to damage aircraft at Shannon. The hammers are displayed and documented in a context of labour and informed, intelligent dissent.

There’s a dystopian air to Maria McKinney’s biggest piece, an arrangement of shopping trolleys laden with what looks like masses of balloons formed by joined-up cocktail umbrellas. Three nude mannequins are in the midst of this consumerist celebration, their backs liberally studded with hundreds of burnt matches.

There might be a comment on self-destructive behaviour in all this. Indeed, shopping, obsessive behaviours and the transformation of everyday materials and objects are recurrent features of McKinney’s work. Supermarket shopping baskets feature in several of her other pieces, all sprouting fantastic, woven interventions. Taken individually, though, they are much more startling and effective than they are en masse.

Though they work in different idioms entirely, there is some common ground between painters Kevin Cosgrove and Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh, in that both view the artistic process, and a picture in the making, as a space of possibility, even of transformative potential. Cosgrove has followed a consistent course since his exceptionally accomplished degree show at NCAD some years back. His subdued, representational images, made with a beautifully casual air, often feature the workshops of boat builders, surfboard or cabinet makers, or motorcycle mechanics. We also see cabin cruisers on blocks, perhaps awaiting repair, a section of a military vessel, and an office interior.

They have been described as mostly male environments, which is true, though more significantly they centre on making things, craft, skill and reaching out and exploring the world. An exploratory impulse is also evident in Ní Mhaonaigh’s paintings. Many of her series are built around a particular kind of space. She doesn’t identify these locations literally, but they have, typically, the qualities of an arena, a sports field, a stage or, more recently, a civic space and perhaps, introducing a more ominous note, a landscape under threat.

A tactile painter, Ní Mhaonaigh uses rich, creamy coats of oil paint to create sumptuous surfaces. She is judicious in her palette, using colour sparingly and well, always finding an edgy balance between austerity and lushness. Series that address specific spaces are complemented by a smaller number that use repeated motifs in informal grids. These are more surface than space and hence very different in feeling. Mark Swords, whose solo show was reviewed last week, muses on the aims and means of making images, be they patterns or pictures, in works that relish every step of processes involved in an open, expansive manner.

In a way it’s surprising to find Aideen Barry among these “seven young artists” – though she is surprisingly young. It’s just that she’s been active as a fully formed artistic personality for so long now that she is really a well established artist. And as it happens she is ubiquitous on the exhibition scene at the moment, featuring in many group shows. A performance artist of gothic sensibility from Galway, she has built up a distinctive persona, one involving elaborately inventive costumes, and her work in the show, deriving from a spell at the Kennedy Space Centre, is terrifically accomplished.

On film, she floats, weightless, a spectral, semi-foetal presence in a bravura piece that is hypnotic and mingles metaphysics with characteristic humour. The incorporation of a domestic appliance, a vacuum cleaner, connects to her other sculptural exhibits, exquisitely machined objects that are part hand grenade, part aerosol spray. In a way the film by the remaining participant, John O’Connell, reflects frugal values, evoking a world with apparently minimal means. There is a post-apocalyptic quality to the expanses of landscape that he evokes. All seven artists in Futures take nothing for granted, but they’re not pessimistic and doubtful: they’re pretty sure of what they’re doing, curious about the world and have plenty of confidence and ability.

PAUL DORAN'S SHOWat Green on Red is untitled, but could usefully be named "Past in Relation to Futures", because in it he continues his ongoing appraisal of European painting, moving on from his meditations on the pre and early Renaissance to the beginning of the last century and the advent of Cubism, when Braque and Picasso drew on an analytical strain in the work of Cezanne. They took pictorial space and subject matter apart and put them back together in segments, and Doran too engages in some serious disassembly.

Once known for his use of lavish thicknesses of oil paint, he here gives the impression of paring back, scraping away, arriving at a kind of pictorial residue that conveys all essential information.

Colour is often muddied and veiled in grey, but it manages to shine through nonetheless. And there are many more pictorial elements subjected to a comparable process of give and take: patterns, linear geometric structure and more blocky, solid objects, and even the container that is the picture frame. Each painting is an argument pursued to a point of definitive inconclusion, emerging as a paradox out of a mass of cancellations, contradictions and dead ends. Doran is a thoughtful artist whose work is never less than visually engrossing.

• Futures: Galleries I, II and III. RHA, Gallagher Gallery, Ely Place, Dublin Until September 27

• Paul Doran: Recent paintings: Green on Red Gallery, Lombard St East Until October