Dim views of the modern world

Visual arts: Some years ago Tom Fitzgerald's work referred specifically to the reconstructed crannóg at Craggaunowen in Co Clare and, more generally, paid homage to the skill and enterprise of our ancestors.

His own exceptional feel for materials echoed the innovative flair of his remote predecessors in engineering and managing their environment. The island village might well have been intended as a microcosm for the larger island.

In A History of Silence at the Ashford Gallery, he takes an updated look at the state of the island and, judging by the bitter, caustic tone of the work he has made, he doesn't much like what he sees.

While his approach is humorous, the humour is hard and sarcastic. Nationalist idealism and pious pretensions are depicted as variously debased, abused and usurped. The personification of Ireland, Cathleen Ní Houlihan, appears in a series of slate relief carvings, their circular form recalling commemorative medallions. Cathleen is groped by a supposed saint, undergoes plastic surgery, and "sells her soul for a home in Foxrock". But Fitzgerald's targets extend well beyond Celtic Tiger Ireland, to the modern world in general. Big business is lambasted in several ways.

In one of his drawings, Tobacco Industry supplies Adam & Eve with lung bypass technology, the two nude figures, equipped with their strap-on breathing apparatus, puff away happily. Fitzgerald has gone one step further in actually fabricating the depicted lung-bypass devices, in a rather beautiful sculpture which combines stainless steel, brass, tar, rubber, plastic and, very inventively, wool.

As with many of his sculptural pieces, it is about functionality, and is in a way a paean to the felicitous qualities of materials purposefully shaped and combined, but without being itself functional. What is different here, as opposed to his evocations of early human ingenuity, is the way the notional function relates to a self-imposed problem, surely implying a dim view of humanity.

Like his three-dimensional work, Fitzgerald's drawings are crisply made, and they have a schematic quality. Generally he doesn't make compositions in single, coherent pictorial spaces. Rather he treats each sheet as an engineer or an architect might, mapping out his ideas, adding supplementary details as though making plans which, on occasion (as in the case of the lung-bypass device), he is. Put together the various elements of the show and you arrive at a kind of allegorical fantasy in the mould of Swift.

Showing at Green on Red, Tom Hunter is one of the best of a number of artists who make carefully staged photographic tableaux. The phenomenon sounds like a throwback to the stagy, morally instructive 19th-century photographic allegories made by Oscar Rejlander or Henry Peach Robinson, and indeed it has much in common with them, not least the acknowledged attentiveness to painting that has been Hunter's hallmark from the beginning. His re-workings of paintings by Vermeer and the Pre-Raphaelites rightly attracted much attention. In his contemporary counterpart of Vermeer's Woman Reading a Letter, the letter is a repossession order.

Similarly, here, in Living in Hell and Other Stories, compositional and narrative elements from the history of Western painting, partly gleaned during a residency in London's National Gallery, are transposed to present-day Hackney, as reported in the headlines of the tabloid Hackney Gazette. Why not? The affairs of deities and heroes we find in high art are at heart dramatisations of everyday experience.

Artifice informs every aspect of Hunter's method. To begin with there is the tacit awareness that representational conventions govern the ostensibly factual treatment of stories in the tabloids, and also govern purely reportage photography, in which every picture is designed to tell a readily appreciated, familiar story in a sensational way. You could say that Hunter's starting point is that stories and pictures are made.

Given that, it is fair to say that he has a classical rather than a romantic sensibility as a picture-maker. He takes an incendiary headline such as Gang Rape Ordeal or the literally incendiary Lover Set on Fire in Bed, and makes of them carefully poised, painterly images.

One could remark, critically, that he drains all the urgency and drama out of the image. It's true - he does so time after time - but it's also how his pictures work, and is in fact a major point in their favour.

He slows things down, encouraging us to slowly assimilate detail, the opposite of the instantly absorbed, instantly discarded model of tabloid communication. Rather than focusing on isolated fragments, he provides us with whole images, generous contexts as detailed and considered as compositions by Poussin.

This isn't to say that drama and, more to the point, emotion, are banished from his images, just that he is temperamentally closer to Vermeer or Poussin than, say, Delacroix.

It's important to note that he doesn't reference paintings as an exercise in knowingness. Rather, his work is based on the proposition that an inherited visual tradition provides a viable way of exploring the full breadth of contemporary experience, with the application of contemporary technology.

The show includes several photographs from another series of work, Phoenix to Vegas, based on an American journey. These differ in tone, each centring on a single person in a highly distinctive setting, yet each individual is apparently alienated from that setting, lost in an interior world. There is a cinematic scope to Pickup Girl, gazing out at us from the pickup truck of the title, behind a metal fence that demarcates the building site of a huge, suburban bungalow, incongruously situated in a vast desert landscape.

A History of Silence, Tom Fitzgerald, Ashford Gallery until May 18 (01-6617286) Living in Hell and Other Stories, Tom Hunter, Green on Red Gallery until May 27 (01-6713414)