Reviewed

Mirrored, Katy Simpson, Ois∅n Gallery (01-6611315), Dublin, until Saturday

2c Langdale Rd BN3 4HN, Stephen Loughman, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (01-8740064), Dublin, until December 1st

Life And Death In Hackney, Tom Hunter, Green on Red Gallery (01-6713448), Dublin, until December 23rd

Fine Art MA Exhibition, Hugh Lane Gallery (01-8741903), Dublin, until January 13th

Perhaps people are so strongly drawn to Katy Simpson's paintings because there is always space for them in her work - space, and time, as the title of her first solo show, Still Time, suggested. In fact, it suggested time stilled, time remaining and time revisited in the form of our penchant for reworking experiences in memory. Simpson's montages of evocative settings and details offered us narrative spaces to inhabit and explore.

Now, in Mirrored, her second solo outing, at the Ois∅n Gallery, she revisits familiar territory but doesn't repeat herself. As with Luc Tuymans, while much of her imagery seems to be derived from second-hand sources - notably, perhaps, from photographs, photographic reproductions and cinema stills - her interest in this visual material is not ironic or dismissive, but lies in its potential as a repository of feeling. Her visual language is indirect, at several removes from the flatly real, but it is about what is real, rather than being about alienation, for example.

With certain exceptions, people appear only fleetingly and fragmentarily in her work. The view of a torso in Still, for example, while oblique, is rare. The exceptions are the images of children, many of which were made for the television documentary States Of Fear, whose producers responded to the distance, poignance and recollected trauma that characterise Simpson's work and realised she could make images appropriate to their material.

Elsewhere, her preferred vocabulary is one of spaces and objects. The spaces are usually domestic. We see vacated beds, bathrooms, living rooms, staircases, doorways, the tangled cord of a telephone, a cup and saucer, doorknobs, empty chairs. It is surprisingly akin to Francis Bacon's pictorial terrain.

But instead of foregrounding the drama, there is an air of aftermath, a sense of reflecting on something that has already happened, of dealing with absence, so that the potential warmth, comfort, sensuality and enjoyment of what we see are somehow negated by loss.

In fact, one piece is titled Aftermath. In it, evident only in terms of an underlying texture, a violent splash disturbs a muted, monochrome view of bathroom taps. There is a lot of empty space in the gallery, in the form of flat-painted punctuation panels.

Oddly, it is these ellipses that have become more important in Simpson's work, which remains engrossing, open-ended and accessible.

Simpson is one of the artists in See It As It Is, Carissa Farrell's Dra∅ocht exhibition of what might be called new realist painters. Stephen Loughman is another. His current solo show, at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, is called 2c Langdale Rd, BN3 4HN.

It is an almost frighteningly dispassionate pictorial record of the flat indicted by the title. Loughman has also made work influenced by cinema. His approach here is to present a series of interior views that are surreal or unreal in their meticulous straightforwardness.

How come? Partly because he frames his images unconventionally. Rather than make neat compositions, he gives us the bits that pictures tend to leave out, so we are looking at things in a way that we do not normally see them, or in a way that they are not intended to be seen.

The full extent of an empty couch, for example. It's hard to know whether he exaggerates its dimensions for effect, but he certainly gets the effect. Or, again, the full height of a pair of curtains in another image, rendered with flattened perspective and strangely theatrical. One of the most striking pieces, a diptych depicting a doorway, is both clever and relatively conventional.

It is interesting how photography has fed back fruitfully into the work of Loughman, Simpson et al when, logically, one would expect that it might have supplanted what they are doing. With Tom Hunter, whose exhibition Life And Death In Hackney is showing at the Green on Red Gallery, painting feeds into photography.

Hunter first attracted attention with his elaborately staged photographic tableaux, reworking themes and compositions from well-known art historical images, and that is, in part, what he does here. Besides staged compositions referring to Pre-Raphaelite paintings (including a drowned Ophelia), he shows portraits of squatters - his friends and neighbours - in and around Hackney, in London.

His Cibachrome images are beautifully made, vividly coloured and, occasionally, quite striking. There is a bohemian quality to his depictions of his subjects that recalls Augustus John's romantic identification with gypsies.

While his larger, staged narrative pieces are ingeniously done, their interplay of painting and photographic elements reads more as entertainment than anything else, which is, of course, perfectly legitimate.

This year's graduates of the fine-art MA course at the National College of Art and Design get a chance to show their work in style in a polished exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery. It begins and ends with video. First Daniel de Chenu's dazzling chronicle of a seascape through time, a hypnotic blending of subtle colour transformations; then Robert Armstrong's abrasive vision of a contemporary Sweeney astray in the Dublin of the Celtic Tiger, pointedly cut off from life in the state of nature, which, all the same, miraculously and indifferently endures.

These works frame two rooms of uniformly strong work, some of it presented differently this time around. Joe Hanley's prints, for example, are arrayed in a fine, imposing grid. Appropriately titled Relentless, it expresses the frenetic pace of contemporary urban life in terms from pure abstraction to photographic documentation. With its relentless rhythmic pace, it is almost musical.

Paul Doran shows just two of his small paintings, but when you see them, in their impossible concentrations of painterliness, you will see why.