Like running into the Marx Brothers

REVIEWED: Permaculture, Project, Dublin, until March 22nd (1850-260027).Bridget Flannery, Cross Gallery, Dublin, until February 27th (01-4738978). Maria Charlton, Land and Sky, Bridge Gallery, Dublin, until March 4th (01-8729702).

Permaculture, at Project, is a group show with a difference. Rather than being thematic in any obvious way, it is built around an accident of geography, drawing together artists based in or otherwise associated with Dublin in the recent past.

Works by 30-plus artists are crammed into the Project's substantial but by no means large exhibition space. The result is a mixed-media equivalent of the crowded-stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers' A Night At The Opera, an artistic traffic jam of competing, overlapping voices and visions. As the title and concept imply, that is the point.

Underlying the physical fact of the show is the notion of the city as heterogeneous nexus, as the busy centre of an evolving, ad hoc cultural network of comings and goings, a focus for the hectic interchange of ideas. If this sounds as if the show amounts to a chance cross section of cultural activity, in the event it clearly is not. Its crowded, haphazard air is of course more a matter of contrivance than of chance, as is the list of participating artists.

That said, it is an enjoyable, invigorating event. You have to admire the willingness of the artists to take their chances in a setting so congested that it looks like a conscious riposte to the vogue for minimal exhibition layouts. It is as if the artists have gone about their business having dropped their artistic offspring, their darlings, off at art crèche for the day.

And what a rowdy lot they are, all vying for attention, all out to impress. A lot of them can't be dragged away from the television, although Maurice O'Connell likes drawing and has done his best to draw a circle, over and over and over. There is a big heap of failed attempts on the ground. He should probably have enlisted the help of Robert Carr, whose feats of three-dimensional geometry are extraordinary. You have to keep an eye on the quiet ones: Stephen Brandes also likes drawing but, oh dear, has headed straight for the wall, which has also proved irresistible for Ronan McCrea, whose text installations seem to work equally well in any space, empty or crowded. Darragh Hogan and Isobel Nolan are exceptionally advanced at woodwork. Karl Burke, another woodworker, likes making things but doesn't have their finesse. He's more Bob the Builder, manfully conquering space with lengths of two-by-four.

Watch out for Corban Walker, whose After Latitude could catch you unawares - as, for that matter, could Christophe Neumann's soaring Tensor Numenata, which is ingenious and looks terrific. Caroline McCarthy and Aoife Collins keep everyone happy by making them laugh, a quality not to be underestimated. There is much more, but then the point of Permaculture is probably to experience it haphazardly.

Bridget Flannery is a thoughtful, accomplished painter. Her paintings at the Cross Gallery consist of poised arrangements: bands and blocks of textured colours, colours redolent of earth and sky. For the most part she works to a square format, on boards from just 20 centimetre square up to 80 centimetres square. Ragged-edged pieces of paper are often collaged onto the surfaces, thickly covered over by paint. She uses strong tonal contrasts and fiery bursts of molten red.

The vast majority of the titles either employ musical terms or refer to landscape. Certainly there is a strong feeling of landscape in most of the paintings, or at least landscape in a particular, heightened sense. It is as though Flannery is dealing with large-scale geological processes rather than with how things look on a familiar level. But it seems likely that she also uses landscape imagery to refer to an inner, imaginative world.

That is, landscape is not the subject of her paintings. The function of the landscape imagery is to provide her with a workable space in which she can explore the emotional, expressive qualities of colour, texture and tone. Similarly with her references to music, which point us towards an emotional terrain rather than indicating a musical preoccupation as such. In a way her paintings offer us contemplative spaces, but not easy spaces. They are considered, contested, continually renegotiated. You could say the works emerge through continual self-questioning. Although she works very much in series, there are individual pieces along the way that are outstanding, including Prelude XIII and Terra Incognita VIII.

Maria Charlton, whose Land and Sky is showing at the Bridge Gallery, attempts something broadly similar to Flannery. But her work displays nothing like the same rigour and self-questioning. In offering us a series of variations of a stylised, scorched landscape, she settles too easily into the unchallenged repetition of a motif. It's not that she doesn't have ability, but the difference is between illustrating an idea and arriving at a composition through the critical process of making it.