The first of the year's annual Degree and Diploma exhibitions, the NCAD's, opens next Sunday and, for anyone with an interest in where Irish art is going, it is essential viewing. There is range, ability and, most importantly, considerable individual flair on view in works that manage to take you by surprise. Installations that stand out include: Eilish O'Toole's ambitious Sky Room in which sky views, projected onto a big gauze cube, engender a euphoric sense of airy spaciousness and depth; Deirdre Ann Doherty's distillation of film noir, which takes the form of her own elliptical "film" The Femme Fatale; Christel Chaudet's simple, effective video Nature Morte; Louisa Sloan's witty musings on narcissism; and Alexander Mood's subtle meditation on physical and emotional distance, in the form of images without words and words without images.
The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans was instrumental in establishing a trend for oblique, understated painting made with a measure of ironic distance, but also, almost paradoxically, with total commitment, and there is a fair amount of work that falls into that category, to a greater or lesser extent - which is not a criticism, incidentally, just an observation. Fiona Whelan, Fergal Courtney and Ailis Codd convincingly employ a comparable approach in a diversity of ways. Suzette Tackney's promising, landscape-based paintings are also quiet and understated, but in a different way. Saralene Tapley creates terrific eroded, battered surfaces by - and why not? - letting the surfaces get battered and eroded, linking the technique to the repetitious patterns of urban life.
Photography is a big preoccupation for some painters, including, notably, Tim Millen, Brian Hannigan, Anthony Edwards and Coilin Rush. There isn't that much photography per se, which is odd given its current prominence, but it's strongly represented by the work of Monica Kerrane (strongly atmospheric), and by Anna Browne and Kate Byrne's technically-polished bag's-eye-view of a handbag snatch, which has real visual flair. Other highlights include Lisa Hartung's elaborate Elsie One - which is part storyboard, part comic-book, featuring a kind of engaging female Bladerunner - though you do get the feeling that Hartung is so caught up in her own creation that she forgets the point she set out to make. Colin Campbell's Star Wars trilogy is visually striking and conceptually ingenious: glossy stripe paintings formed by strips of videotape. All of which by no means exhausts what's on offer, but might serve to give something of the flavour of a very large, consistently engaging show.
Leonard Sheil's work, at the Paul Kane Gallery, is an audacious sequel to his Spice Island voyage paintings. These mixed-media paintings are also about voyages to islands, but (with one or two exceptions), if you go to see his show, don't expect to encounter recognisable landmarks, never mind conventional maritime painting. It seems as if the work is more a bid to express the whole complex experience of voyaging and a personal relationship with the sea. To this end, the irregular textures, the rapturous bursts of colour, and a sense of something grave, deep, old and overwhelming suggest approaches to sublimity.
Among the larger pieces, The Old Man of Hoy is a fine, beautifully-textured picture, and a set of roughly circular works on paper - two recognisably of the sea and the sky, two more colourful and abstract - are particularly striking. To his credit, Sheil is as adventurous and out-there in his work as the voyages sound in life.
Based in Italy, Anne Donnelly, showing at the RHA's Ashford Gallery, has been a regular exhibitor in Ireland. Even when she has turned to Irish subjects, though, her bleached-out colours and chalky textures suggest the Mediterranean. She paints landscapes, birds and figures. There aren't many figures here, but her big, classical heads - stoical and durable despite their delicacy - are very effective.
In art as in much else, constraints are more often an advantage than a handicap, and Donnelly keeps her painterly language pared down, laying paint on thickly with a knife (or so the appearance of her work suggests), scraping lines through it, never getting too fussy or bogged down in decorative detail. The buildings, fields, almond trees and gulls that feature in her pictures become almost geometric building blocks for the compositions: the interlocking arcs of the gulls' wings, the networks of village buildings, the patchwork of grass and trees in blossom. But she never loses sight of her nominal subject matter. Not everything in the garden is rosy: the work is uneven, there is perhaps too much in the show, and a little editing would certainly have helped the overall impression, but that's a minor quibble. Occasionally she achieves a pure, elemental simplicity, as in some of the heads, and in the terrific little The Field, which is simply that, but has something of the quiet authority of Patrick Collins's paintings of Irish smallholdings.
In The Humours of Zeus & Co at the Rubicon Gallery, Michael Kane casts individuals from here and now as the gods and goddesses of classical mythology, underlining the enduring relevance of classical archetypes. James Joyce, and indeed Kane himself, have worked in this kind of vein before. But when Kane writes, in an entertaining commentary, that: "The gods reign in opulence and drive expensive cars", it seems for a moment that he has in mind a satire on the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger economy, with fat-cat gods lording it in their '99-reg Mercs.
In fact he doesn't, particularly, and it's a pity. There must be scope there for satire. The mythic crew are more woven into ordinary, everyday life, with Zeus and Hera as a middle-aged couple reclining naked in their deckchairs, for example, and Aphrodite's birthplace transposed from the Island of Cythera to Sandymount Strand. They are an unprincipled, wilful bunch, sexual predators who casually inflict horrendous violence on each other. It's entertaining stuff, but, executed in the form of mostly very large, spontaneous dry-points, it also seems sketchy and insubstantial in the face of such narrative ambition. Perhaps Kane will develop the idea further.
NCAD Degree and Diploma Exhibitions, NCAD 100 Thomas Street and the RHA Gallagher Gallery, June 6th-13th (Closed Monday); Anne Donnelly, Recent Works, Ashford Gallery, RHA, until June 17th; Leonard Sheil, New Works, Paul Kane Gallery until June 12th; Michael Kane, The Humours of Zeus & Co, Rubicon Gallery until June 12th
