Recasting mass cultural forms

Visual Arts:Stephen Loughman and Mark O'Kelly at the Galway Arts Centre make a good pairing. Their paintings are intermingled throughout the gallery spaces, maintaining a lively and provocative dialogue.

Certain contrasts and distinctions are immediately apparent. Loughman presents us with a series of diverse, uninhabited settings, urban and rural, indoors and out. O'Kelly's work, on the other hand, is generally crowded with people. He has a particular penchant for depicting audiences, and there are a couple here, their attention fixed on various kinds of cultural spectacle. Alternatively, we see not the audience but the performers - even in his more prosaic, everyday scenes, the subjects come across as performers, people acting out their parts.

His sources are generic magazine photographs, details from the mass media wallpaper that forms a backdrop to our lives and provides us with distraction, titillation and amusement. Life is translated into a form of popular theatre in these images, and we learn what to expect from them and how to read them without even realising it.

O'Kelly builds up a composite picture of the ritualised dance between onlookers and performers enacted at every cultural level. Though precisely and meticulously made, his paintings have the appearance of being works in progress, alluding to the technology of mass reproduction that churns out many thousands of copies of instantly disposable images. There is something almost perverse about his considered appropriation of ephemeral, essentially nondescript items of mass consumption, though it is a phenomenon by no means unique to his work.

In fact its rationale probably derives from Walter Benjamin's influential 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Greatly preoccupied with the relative novelty and radical potential of cinema, Benjamin suggested that the advent of infinitely reproducible mass art forms would lead to the demise of the innately conservative idea of the original, single artwork and the withering of its attendant "aura".

He was right and wrong. Mass cultural forms rule the roost, though the radicalising potential of cinema has only been patchily realised, and the aura of the original has in many ways been enhanced by the triumph of the multiple. Equally, makers of single, authentic artifacts have shown a lively interest in mass culture and its workings. O'Kelly explores some of the tangled relations between generic and unique, extreme duration and instantaneity, to convey something of the reality of contemporary cultural discourse in, as Hugo Hamilton notes in his catalogue text, the age of Big Brother and Sky News.

Loughman too draws on material in popular culture as the sources for his paintings. He looks to iconic mainstream feature films. His strategy, of looking at the familiar in terms of oblique details, is also one that crops up in the work of other artists, but his application of it is particularly effective. He focuses on particular settings, devoid of actors and action, as though rejecting the Hollywood narrative logic of pivotal moments. Instead, he describes deserted, slightly uncanny spaces, infused with an air of unease.

This is not attributable to his source imagery alone. True, there is something ominous or downright creepy about most of the scenes he chooses. They include, for example, settings from Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But even a passing familiarity with Loughman's work in the long term will confirm that it is invariably characterised by an air of unease. This quality derives from several factors, not least his highly realistic but also stylised, deadpan mode of representation. He spells out an image with even, pedantic concentration, favouring subdued, flat lighting. Then there is that fact that the spaces in his work are deserted but charged with the expectation or recollection of action.

The filmic locations in this series of work are part of collective consciousness. The dramas that lend them their symbolic power, their resonance, are excised, so that they become unfamiliar to varying degrees, but they are still charged with a disturbing residue of that power, and they gain something else again, becoming available to us as anomalous spaces. Spaces, that is, not tied to the fixed narrative arcs of the films, but set oddly adrift between those stories, reality and our own musings and recollections. It's persuasive, memorable work.

INTO LANDSCAPE IS a group touring exhibition of landscape drawings which originated in Macroom in Cork. Its latest venue is the Gallery of Garter Lane Arts Centre in Waterford, currently located in a handsome Georgian space. The show is edited somewhat to fit comfortably, which it does: it looks terrific in its well-proportioned setting. It gains from the fact that there is no unanimity of approach among the 15 participants. What we get are a succession of different views of how to tackle a landscape drawing.

The ways and means include Philippa Sutherland's fine brush drawings which present us, in a way related to Loughman's work, with the idea of an inconclusive narrative space. Cool and elliptical, her images have a cinematic feeling about them. Having seen this show in its Macroom incarnation, it is interesting to look at it again. Jim Sheehy's beautiful drawings of Winter Trees gain from repeated viewings. Their complex traceries of branches have an inexorable, closely argued quality that is compelling and verges on abstraction.

Michael Canning's highly formalised views of plants and landscapes shuffle through the conventions of pictorial construction, including the botanical, the topographical and the picturesque. Arno Kramer, on the other hand, offers richly sensual, dreamy meditations on the remembered experience of place and time. There isn't a dull or formulaic piece in the whole show, which means, oddly enough, that you have to give it the time and attention it deserves. Do that and you'll be well rewarded.

• Stephen Loughman and Mark O'Kelly, Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street, until Jan 26; Into Landscape, Garter Lane Arts
• Centre, O'Connell Street, Waterford, until Feb 23