A terrific exhibition dogged by doubt

VISUAL ARTS: I CAN / CAN I?: on paintings and potentialityat Temple Bar Gallery is one of the best exhibitions running in Dublin at the moment, thanks in no small part to the vim and vigour of Sonia Shiel's contribution to the proceedings.

It's a three-person show, and to single her out is in no way to disparage her two companions, Michael Coleman and Hanneline Visnes, but Shiel's centrepiece, an elaborate painted construction titled Sal-on, will surely bring a smile to your face.

All three artists are painters, and the show's proposition is that "interrogation and experimentation" are necessary if painting "is to continue to evolve towards a place of limitless potential". Yet, as an explanatory note suggests, a state of potentiality implies the possibility of potential remaining unrealised, hence the doubt that dogs the assertive I Can.

Coleman is an obvious candidate for such a show. It's hard to think of another painter whose work is poised so precariously on the edge of potentiality, and who is so intent on second guessing himself, on never giving in to the predictable or the obvious. There's a necessary ruthlessness to the way he is prepared to invest hugely in a body of work and then, because it seems too settled or consolidated, negate it all at a stroke.

He has earned a reputation for enormous changes at the last minute, for obliterating an exhibition's worth of work just as it's due to open. Except that, for him, obliteration is not only part of but is in a way the point of the work. His composite in this show, Seventh Heaven, consists of seven canvasses of various dimensions, each painted monochromatically but unevenly with a colour enlivened by the addition of iridescent, acrylic pigment, giving a bit of a lift to things. A sense of precariousness is communicated.

By contrast, Visnes's work, which is meticulously representational, is fixed and definite. It does fix impossible realities, though, in surreal images.

Eagles in paired formations hold jewellery aloft for our inspection, for example. While the work is technically accomplished, it also comes across as being a bit arch and contrived.

The same could be said for Shiel's various pieces, but contrivance is what they are about. Her Sal-onis a ramshackle assemblage of painted wood, card, canvasses and other elements that combine to create a likeness of an archetypal saloon bar in the Wild West, as filtered through films and comic books. The whole edifice is liberally punctured by bullet holes and has a wild, anarchic energy that threatens to tear the illusion apart. Yet somehow it does hold brilliantly together as a piece of bravura contrivance. Painting wet in wet, Shiel builds up thick surfaces of incredibly glossy oil paint, and the sheer lushness is ideally suited to The Studio, a small painting in which a Casanova-like figure lends new meaning to the term painting the nude.

AT THE KERLIN Gallery, two youngish painters battle it out. Not literally, obviously, but the work of Nicholas Byrne and Benedikt Hipp is sufficiently similar to generate some friction when intermingled, as it is in this exhibition. Byrne is English and Hipp is German. They both work in ways that evidence a deep engagement with the history of painting. Early modernism is cited, and is much in evidence, and one could easily go back much further as well, to the Renaissance fascination with the possibilities of perspective and illusion. Both favour intricately, even obsessively worked surfaces and both incline towards dark tonalities, though Byrne also has a penchant for a nice range of pale peachy and lemony colours.

Differences arise in terms of subject matter and composition. Hipp's paintings come across as being a series of responses to the tradition of portraiture and other stylistic conventions. Taking a basic portrait format, he feeds in various pictorial devices associated with abstraction, using geometric repeat patterns and coloured grids, for example, and thus disrupting our habitual reading of the image. It's interesting if very cerebral work.

Byrne also unites several diverse conventions in single compositions. There is a tremendous feeling of compression to his paintings, which are incredibly intricate by virtue of the sheer accumulation of detailed gestures. You have to look closely, and when you do you have the sense of finding worlds within worlds: worlds of pictorial possibility contained within others and so on in an infinite regression. There's an obsessive quality to it and, perhaps paradoxically, a feeling of openness as well.

JUST ENDED at the Original Print Gallery, Louise Meade's Dark Nightwas an intense, quietly persuasive show. Her etchings and monoprints referred to landscape and, in at least one instance, to a single, tulip-like flower, but in them the physical world and its objects hovered always at the edge of visibility, never quite becoming material. The surfaces looked as if they had evolved gradually through a process of addition and erasure, and were infused with subtle colour and the faint traces of forms and marks made by the jagged bite of acid, or methodical cross-hatching and more fluid, relaxed lines.

Meade, an accomplished printmaker, managed to generate a sense of space, a space that was at once actual and dreamlike. It had atmosphere, as in real atmosphere - weather, temperature, rawness - but also a meditative quality, a distance from immediate actuality. An art of subtle nuances and inflections, it was nonetheless powerful and vivid.

• I Can / Can I?: on paintings and potentialityMichael Coleman, Sonia Shiel and Hanneline Visnes. Temple Bar Gallery, Temple Bar, Dublin Until Sep 20th 01-6710073 Nicholas Byrne and Benedikt Hipp. Kerlin Gallery, Anne's Lane South, Anne St, Dublin Until Sep 6th 01-6709093 Dark NightLouise Meade. Original Print Gallery, 4 Temple Bar Ended Aug 14th 01-6773657