Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: There is an obsessive, hermetic quality to the work of all three artists showing at the Kerlin.

Reviewed

Phillip Allen, Diana Cooper and Paul McDevitt: Group show, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until May 31st (01-6709093)

Martin Healy: Looking For Jodie (Amityville) 2001/02, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until June 7th (01-6708055)

Dermot Seymour: Dog, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until May 31st (01- 8740064)

Niamh McGrath: Paintings, The Bridge Gallery, Dublin, until May 31st (01-8729702)

It is as if each zeroes in on an arbitrary way of seeing and organising the world and follows through on it to the point of absurdity. Much of what they do could come under the heading of outsider art, but what sets it apart is their knowingness. All are in their 30s, and one of the things they know is that the modernist game is up, that the dream of a grand, all-encompassing style has been abandoned. Instead we have postmodernist parodies of totality.

It is an inevitable limitation of all their work, however, that it may amount to nothing more than the extreme exaggeration of a stylistic quirk. Diana Cooper, for example, extrapolates on the kinds of concentric doodles of geometric shapes that bored students make to while away hours of classroom tedium. Taken to extremes, these become musings on systems and their underlying idiosyncrasies. Doodles are also a point of reference for Paul McDevitt, who makes painstakingly worked hallucinogenic fantasy images with ordinary ballpoint pens and coloured pencils. He recurrently mocks utopian ambitions with playfully absurd juxtapositions of insanely kitsch motifs and panoramic settings.

Systems and the idea of order are also germane to the work of Phillip Allen, perhaps the most interesting artist of the three. Horizontal bands, top and bottom, frame central spaces in the paintings. These spaces are given over to various emblematic representations of networks, like analytical but utterly obscure diagrams. The framing bands, meanwhile, are densely populated by extraordinary three-dimensional florets of pigment, halfway between embellishments and detritus. The tension between the two kinds of pictorial space is interesting and strange.

Amityville, in New York state, was the location of a series of purportedly true supernatural events in the 1970s that formed the subject of The Amityville Horror, a best-selling book by Jay Anson, and a series of sensational films. Apart from the general appeal of scary tales of the supernatural, the story, along with many others at the time, including Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist, tapped into a distinctively American paranoia. What is salient about the Amityville saga is not only the creepy goings-on but also the fact that the creepiness erupts in the heart of Americana, in the midst of folksy comfort and affluence.

The Irish artist Martin Healy went in search of Amityville; the resultant photographs form his exhibition Looking For Jodie (Amityville) 2001/02, at the Rubicon Gallery. They are terrific images. The note of quest implied by the title ties in perfectly with the way an atmosphere of unease builds cumulatively throughout the body of work.

With picket fences, picture-postcard houses and a sense of order and comfort, the suburban environment seems to exemplify the American dream. But Healy goes consistently for deserted spaces and viewpoints that suggest a potentially malign observer.

He is especially good on shadows and darkness, capturing the vulnerability of houses illuminated by electric light in the vast, inky darkness. Even more effectively, he conveys the abrupt chill of gloomy undergrowth just a few steps away from the friendly glare of sunlight. In one particularly nice touch, the Stars and Stripes is faintly visible, fluttering in the background, while the foreground space is filled with ambiguous but ominous details.

Dermot Seymour's Dog begs the prefix My Life As A . . . . He presents us with a series of meticulously made portraits of individual dogs. Each is very much an individual, and each is treated with the consideration and concentration generally accorded a human sitter, with none of the sentimentality that animals in pictures can inspire. As if to underline this, Dead Dog is just that: a dog lying dead on the street.

Quietly, even unobtrusively, Seymour has become a painter of animals, particularly cows. His careful studies of these living units of economic value, haplessly ensnared in a mega-industry in which they are the product, have what might be termed a hard-headed pathos about them. It is tempting to see, in his paintings of long-suffering beasts, a correspondence with the human predicament. Tempting and reasonable, even if he never forces the issue.

The notion is encouraged by the way he terms the two non-canines featured in the show as Cat Dog and Hare Dog, implying that it's pretty much the same for all of us, this business of being alive.

Each dog, meanwhile, has a great deal invested in being itself. They all seem serious about their doggedness and are mostly world-weary, alert and sensitive-looking, as though they have stories to tell. They can't speak, of course, but then Seymour has told their stories for them.

It seems fair to say that Niamh McGrath's paintings, at the Bridge Gallery, are about the sea, given that it featured centrally in her last exhibition and takes centre stage again in this one, with the horizon line as a distant constant. This time, though, she approaches it in a more considered and analytical manner. The paintings are not even as blue any more. Instead she favours a very nice pale grey-blue and black and white.

She builds her compositions on the basis of geometric divisions of the surface. Within the subdivisions she creates both flat-painted areas and densely textured markings. The straightforward interaction between order and chaos, fixed forms and pure amorphousness, surely relates to our experience of the sea. That is, as something vast, uncontrollable and unpredictable but, simultaneously, in other respects incredibly structured and predictable.

Although these terms may also demarcate McGrath's painterly language, it is clearly weighted in favour of structured predictability. That's good as far as it goes, but among the most interesting pictures here are those in which, like The Ninth Wave or Erosion, she opens up the composition and generates real spaciousness, expansiveness and ambiguity.