Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne Reviewed Stephen Brandes: Ways Of Escape, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Tom Molloy: Allegiance, Rubicon Gallery Sarah Walker: Overland, Hallward Gallery, Dublin Breon O'Casey, Peppercanister Gallery, Dublin,

The background to Stephen Brandes's Ways Of Escape, at the Temple Bar Gallery, in Dublin, is not exactly evident in the work, but it is important. In 1999 he undertook a European journey that retraced his grandmother's 1913 flight from pogroms in Romania.

Although it is not stated in relation to this show, he remarked previously that she ended up in Wolverhampton, in the English midlands, more or less by accident, having quite a different destination in mind. Brandes, who was born in Wolverhampton in 1966, is now based in Cork.

Throughout his journey he kept a diary in the form of hundreds of small drawings, which have shaped and fed the work he has made since. All of this may suggest that the exhibition is a form of biography or autobiography, but although it is informed by personal history it is not explicitly so, in the sense of taking the form of a conventional narrative. Rather we are presented with a series of visual musings that share certain qualities and concerns.

First of all, though, the form of the show. Brandes uses several media and supports, one of them - huge sheets of linoleum - distinctly unorthodox, and employs great disparities of scale, from tiny sheets of paper upwards. The works are irregularly dispersed through the gallery space rather than in a simple, orderly row: positioned very high on the wall or casually attached to the side of a pillar.

This unpredictable variety augments the sense of restlessness and uncertainty, even of unrootedness, played against an equally strong sense of domesticity, that is central to what he does.

Time and again there are references to location, position, places, all of which remain curiously removed and abstracted. The dominant visual idiom is a form of casual graphic illustration that draws us in as though to a comic-book narrative. Brandes does draw us in to a world as narratives do, but in this case the narrative has no beginning or end: it is suspended.

The idea of home as both a physical place and an emotional identification comes across strongly. There are recurrent attempts to visualise the domestic and, in a wider sense, the community. These are effected with deadpan rationality, as if the artist were trying to start from scratch, to figure our how on earth a family might work, how a house might be lived in, how a collection of houses might become a larger organism again. But no matter how large - and he provides thoroughly engaging, engrossing visual accounts of composite communities - the sense of ephemerality comes through.

There is an echo of the powerlessness, the helplessness in the face of history encapsulated in the strange, stylised films of the Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó. This is not strictly an Eastern European phenomenon: in Ireland habitation is associated with stubborn permanence but haunted by memories of depopulation and emigration.

Brandes's large-scale pieces are dominated by drawing, and they are extremely effective, but it's worth noting that, although it is less in evidence in this body of work, he has a lovely touch with paint.

Like many conventionally gifted artists, Tom Molloy is wary of facility, especially of his own facility as a draughtsman. Presumably, that accounts in part for the wilful austerity of his work. His skills are usually deployed in rigorously organised conceptual frameworks that demand his sustained concentration but deny him any possibility of showing off - never more so than in his current Rubicon Gallery show, Allegiance, the title piece of which consists of 50 individual drawings of the stars in a US flag.

Each embroidered star is depicted in remarkable, almost microscopic detail in graphite, so that every thread is visible. Why this obsessive, slavish elaboration of the tiny differences that contribute to apparent sameness? One potential answer is framed by the question: that the US is not a monolithic entity but a coalition of differences on myriad levels.

The supposition that Molloy is thinking of the US's current geopolitical role is supported by several smaller pieces, including a tiny world map collaged from a dollar bill. But then his Grid, a cube composed of the maps of every nation in the world, proposes another idea: that difference might point to an overall sameness or commonality.

In Overland, at the Hallward Gallery, Sarah Walker takes a characteristically cool look at the natural world. Although they are certainly landscapes, her paintings tend to focus on, more or less, one thing at a time. Hence in individual pieces we have vivid eruptions of yellow gorse, purple heather, white bog cotton, straw-coloured grasses in winter.

Each is considered, abstracted and treated in a formalised composition, allowed to dominate its world the way one plant can, momentarily.

Walker builds up textured patterns based on the repetition of such natural motifs. The paintings are on their way to being all-over abstracts when they suddenly remember their provenance. Or, you could say, she lulls us in to reading them that way, then nudges us back to their sources. She does this in more ways than one. Another favourite device is to incorporate, in a colour field, a few diminutive human presences in the form of bright dots of colour.

Her Tree Lined Summer Field plays with the idea of abstraction with comparable humour, its central green void brought down to earth, so to speak, by its factual basis. But of course it works the other way as well: the void is there, in the field.

Walker generally eschews naturalism, but one little painting, Bog River, captures precisely the effect of seeing a blue sky reflected in the middle of bogland. It is her best show to date.

Breon O'Casey, at the Peppercanister Gallery, is recognisably a St Ives artist. That is, based near Penzance, in Cornwall, he is closely aligned with such St Ives School painters as Tony O'Malley. His paintings, with their bold abstract patterning and sonorous colour harmonies, are enriched by atmospheric effects and links with the landscape.

His use of bold areas of bright, intense colour against containing blocks of muted greys and umbers can be very effective. The show also includes several bronzes, among them elegantly simplified representations of birds and a full-size female nude that is also stylised, but only slightly.

Stephen Brandes: Ways Of Escape, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, until June 16th (01-6710073) Tom Molloy: Allegiance, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, ends tomorrow (01-6708055) Sarah Walker: Overland, Hallward Gallery, Dublin, ends tomorrow (01-6621482) Breon O'Casey, Peppercanister Gallery, Dublin, until Wednesday (01-6611279)