VISUAL ARTS/Aidan Dunne: At first glance, Shirana Shahbazi's The Garden, at the Temple Bar Gallery, comes across as a bid to find, in John Berger's phrase, another way of telling.

That is, we are offered a disparate sequence of photographs with no particular contextual information, so that it is up to us to draw our own inferences from what we see.There are carefully posed portraits, a view of a couple talking on a sunny lawn, a fragment of tapestry and various other first- and second-hand images. The show concludes, however, with something that doesn't seem to fit in at all: a huge wall painting of a portrait head, made in quasi-photographic style.

It seems Shahbazi is not so much presenting us with a series of images as expressing an unease with the nature of images and with photography's long- broken promise of veracity.

Her unease comes from her predicament as someone who, whether she likes it or not, finds herself working within highly structured ichnographies and ways of seeing. So again and again she balks at committing herself to what the images might seem to be telling us. Her caution may derive in part from her background. Born in Tehran, she grew up and studied in Germany and now lives in Switzerland, and the jumbling of cultural clues in her work points to the jumbling of cultures in her life. Perhaps this led her to question the way we read images in relatively strict, culturally encoded ways. Yet there is a miscellaneous quality to her show as a whole that, while it may be intentional, is ultimately frustrating. If she is looking for another way of telling, she hasn't quite found it yet.

Deirdre McLoughlin is a ceramic sculptor with a cool, precise sense of elegant form. Her current show, at the Peppercanister Gallery, features two formal types: torso-like bands and vessel-like cups with appendages. The latter proliferate in big, relaxed families of various sizes and colours. The basic cup shape attenuates to a flattened spout or handle that in most cases plays a role in balance. You could read human anatomical and social connotations into these works, which are collectively titled I Am Too.

The implication is that they are all typical and all slightly different, cheerfully diverse but unmistakably related. If the show consisted just of them it would be noteworthy, but it also features a much smaller number of another series of larger works, the Empty Forms. And at least two of these are exceptionally good sculptures by any standard.

They are eloquently economical ceramic bands that almost magically conjure up a sense of human presence and absence, loss and memory, through their use of subtle, ambiguous forms and positive and negative space. In a way they are hardly there at all, but they are amazingly strong works.

Jill Dennis's Rock Flow sounds like a contradiction but presumably offers a clue to her intentions. Rock does flow in nature, in molten and fragmented form, but the dominant subject in her paintings is the flow of water over rock. They are, though, as much, if not more, about the business of making a painted surface and the puzzles and contradictions attendant on doing so. Each of her pictures is a surface but a surface that implies a surface beyond or, in the case of a very good series of plant studies, in front of itself.

The transparency of water and the material sparseness of plants open the way to layered, recessive spaces. If, as Dennis implies, the paint surface is not really there, is an illusion, it does have a compelling kind of virtual life as a focus for huge energies, bound up with the natural materials and processes to which she refers. Her larger paintings are, by their nature, hard to pin down, designed to be elusive. She is more relaxed in a series of much smaller, more conventional studies of sea and land.

There is a curiously retro quality to Brian Harte's paintings in Onus. His use of muddy greys, of tonal contrasts and compressed, centripetal forms recalls the work of several mid-20th century Irish landscape painters. Although he is a very capable painter with a nice touch, the compositional device of a central or off-central hub, in relation to which the pictures energies are concentrated, becomes formulaic through repetition in a series of small, squarish pictures. In Arena, a long, substantially larger oblong, he sets himself a greater challenge, opening out the space and trying to keep the extended territory of the painting energised and alive. That's the way to go.

It wasn't planned that way, but the Solomon Gallery's current Richard Kingston exhibition makes a fitting tribute to a wonderfully unorthodox artistic intelligence. Sadly, the artist died while this show was in preparation. He enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a painter with a notably independent cast of mind. From the 1950s he was making works that were out on their own in Ireland in terms of their formal experimentation. But he never followed a predictable, linear progression, preferring to trust curiosity and instinct for direction.

These led him eventually to a fine series of works inspired by the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland. Causeway 200 is an outstanding example. His analytical approach to things was always tempered by passion, and there are simple, affirmative paintings of flowers here that are quietly and unsentimentally beautiful. Several of the landscapes are extremely good, compositionally complex paintings, particularly the extraordinary Glimpse Of The Atlantic, Donegal and Tide Out - Still Evening Near Burtonport, Donegal.

Reviewed

Shirana Shahbazi: The Garden, Temple Bar Gallery, until March 22nd, 01-6710073

Deirdre McLoughlin, Peppercanister Gallery, Dublin, until March 25th, 01-6611279

Jill Dennis: Rock Flow, Taylor Galleries, Dublin, until March 22nd, 01-6766055

Brian Harte: Onus, Origin Gallery, Dublin, until Mar 31, 01-4785159

Richard Kingston, Solomon Gallery, Dublin, until March 19th, 01-6794237