Limerick's mini-marathon

Just to get around last year's EV+A was a marathon undertaking. Apart from its sheer size, the huge, and hugely ambitious show infiltrated the city so well that it was sometimes indistinguishable. While this year's show is smaller and more tightly contained, it's unlikely that you'll see everything in it unless you're willing to put in the hours (and hours) and turn up at the requisite times. But that's okay; it's the nature of the beast. Rather than being a homogeneous construct, EV+A is an open-ended affair.

This year's adjudicator was an American historian, curator and art dealer, Jeane Greenberg Rohatyn, a vertical invader on her first visit to Ireland, who cut a swathe through submissions from 325 artists, whittling that total down to a manageable 60.

The show's Reduced subtitle relates to the economy of expression she discerned in the work. She had at her disposal the City Art Gallery's new white cube exhibition space, with its polished concrete floor and generous, indirect natural light from a striking, concertina-shaped roof. The rest of the gallery has been substantially revamped as well, and the result is genuinely impressive, leaving curator Paul O'Reilly with plenty of options for future shows. Certainly a lot of artists will be keen to get into that white cube.

Rohatyn has placed the cream of her cool, minimally-inclined and mostly abstract painters there. It is a predictable move, but also an appropriate one, because that is exactly the kind of work that complements the space. So Fergus Martin's architectonic compositions, Sarah Durcan's pale, floating objects (echoed in Maureen O'Connor's more casual forms), Seamus O'Rourke's ghostly, ambiguous images, Ronnie Hughes's self-contained world of shuttling motifs, Helena Gorey's three monochromatic panels, and Diana Copperwhite - whose three-panel work looks as if it was painted partly with water and might disappear at any moment - all enjoy the privilege of inaugurating the new space, and make a very good job of it.

In another nice piece of placement, in an antechamber to this space there are two sprawling but elegantly understated installations: Helen O'Leary's Studio Installa- tion, which recreates the crowded yet calming walls of her studio; and plans for Katie Holten's notional ideal house, represented in the form of whimsical plans, wiring diagrams, flow-charts, graphs and other symbolic means of describing the world. In the hallway, we can try to piece together the fragments of Sandra Meehan's textual narratives that materialise around the walls like thoughts that pop into your head. These snippets of personal stories are also very effective encountered in the street, because her carefully garnered phrases are couched in a style which it is easy to identify with.

Some of the video on offer - and there is a lot - looks suspiciously like mainstream television projects with inferior production values. For example, Lorraine Burrell's piece is a simple sketch. In demonstrating - very, very slowly - that choice of soundtrack influences the way we read images, Daniel Jewesbury is merely restating the obvious. That he's technically capable is indicated by a credit he receives on one of the best video works, Susan MacWilliam's (she's also in the Glen Dimplex Award show at IMMA) Faint, in which a young woman faints repeatedly in a parkland setting. It's a strangely hypnotic, visually beautiful piece, evoking a 19th-century view of women as delicate, sensitive creatures, while the imagery subtly suggests a continuity between woman and nature. Incidentally, pretty much the same idea was ingeniously employed as a running gag in the comedy series Smack the Pony, which underlines yet again the shifting boundaries between mainstream and art video. In their deconstruction of cookery programmes, Mary Kelly and Abigail O'Brien display a critical knowledge of the all-pervasive medium.

Ideas, Richard Dawkins suggested, can spread like viruses. He was thinking, among other things, of teen fashions but on the available evidence he can include constituents of artistic style and content. It seems as if over the past few years everybody has discovered the expressive potential of the kinds of empty, transitional, anonymous urban spaces that the systematisation of city life creates, places like underground car-parks and stations, endless corridors, lobbies, office blocks and so on.

Here Gerard Byrne, Mary McIntyre, Paul O'Neill and Carissa Farrell are the most obvious exemplars of the trend. Of these, McIntyre's big light-box photographs of a disused canteen have real, complex presence (she had a very good show at the Old Museum Arts Centre in Belfast last year). The studied indifference of Stephen Loughman's paintings of suburbia might also come into the category. His work, down at City Hall, is good but the painting there is generally patchier, if buoyed up by Michael Canning and Oliver Comerford, and by some good drawings, including those by Jim Savage.

Apart from the photographers already mentioned, Dara McGrath's work is based on a terrific idea, of tracking down the people who place small adds and photographing them with what they are offering for sale. He uses a severe, harshly lit style, reminiscent of Paul Seawright.

It seems, meanwhile, as if Eoin McCarthy is becoming a one-trick pony. His trick is to take his clothes off in a variety of contexts, previously in work relating to feelings of vulnerability and shyness, but here more obscurely, by musing stagily on the fraught relationship between Britain and Ireland.

Between the predictable and the quirky, Rohatyn has come up with a diverse, stimulating show. Given that less than one in five artists who submitted work made it in, the extremely variable quality is a little alarming, and that's consistent through every medium: painting, video and photography. For one reason or another, conventional sculpture scarcely gets a look in. Next year Invited EV+A will be back. Another marathon?

Unusually, one EV+A exhibitor is a third-year NCAD student, David O'Mara, currently showing in 2000 Degrees, organised and featuring third-year fine-art students at the college. It's a substantial exhibition which includes some outstanding work. Gillian Lawler, Mairead O'hEocha, Eoin MacLochlainn, Tadhg McSweeney, Linda Broughton, Lili Doyle and Aoife Lalor are among those who stand out. Tomorrow is the last day to see it.

EV+A 99 Reduced is at the Lim- erick City Art Gallery and other venues until July 17th. 2000 Degrees is at the Civic Offices, Wood Quay until May 28th