Margaret Corcoran has reworked an iconic painting to reflect modern Ireland. It makes us take a fresh look, writes Aidan Dunne.

The painting that seems to naturally take centre-stage in Margaret Corcoran's exhibition The University at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery is a portrait of a woman in a shop: At the Spar: Tong. Tong - who, as her name suggests, is Chinese - is behind the counter. She looks poised, capable, perhaps mildly amused. It is a scene that is familiar to the point of invisibility in contemporary Ireland, but the image is also familiar in other ways. It is a pointed reworking of an iconic picture by Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, painted in 1882.

The last of Manet's brilliant series of paintings exploring Parisian life, the Folies-Bergère has itself become an icon of modernity. In it, a barmaid faces us, indifferent and aloof, her hands planted firmly on the marble counter-top. As with many of the female figures in Manet's paintings, she looks back, coolly, in a way that disturbs the viewer's habitual sense of superiority. We are placed in the position of the customer ordering a drink but, as many commentators have pointed out, the labyrinthine optics of the painting don't work. The reflection we see in the mirror behind the barmaid is impossible.

The upshot is that our own location, in front of the painting, in thrown into uncertainty. A Marxist interpretation might be that this spatial displacement equates to the state of alienation that is integral to modernity, an interpretation arguably bolstered by the work's emphasis on material luxuries and the conspicuous consumerism of Parisian society.

From the carefully rendered display of expensive goods we might also infer that the process of commodification extends to supposedly inviolate cultural values themselves. Everything is reduced to its market value, everything's for sale.

If you think there's a point about present-day Ireland in there somewhere, you may well be right. Corcoran's work sprang from her realisation that Ireland had changed. One night, calling into her local Spar, as she often has to, it occurred to her that it was staffed "by a wonderful group of people who all seem to be Chinese. There was a certain point at which that happened. I don't mean just in my local shop, I mean throughout Dublin and a large part of the country." That is, the way that immigrant workers have been progressively enlisted to work in shops, restaurants, bars, hotels, building projects and much else.

As she shopped in Spar, she realised that her view of Tong, hands on the counter, surrounded by well-stocked shelves, reminded her of something, and eventually the penny dropped that the something was Manet. The idea of making a painting that revisits Manet came to her.

This is not altogether surprising if you are familiar with any of her previous work. She has consistently reflected inventively on the history of representation, particularly with regard to women as looked at and looking.

An early series of paintings consisted of a number of startling re-enactments of iconic images of women in art history. In them, the compositions are faithfully recreated, but the bodies are missing - there are only the clothes they wear, empty white robes suspended like fancy dress party ghosts.

Another group of paintings features emblems of the unconscious released into the orderly world of classical painting. Her series An Enquiry, refers to Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, a seminal text of the Romantic movement.

Corcoran's paintings depict a girl (clad in white, incidentally) wandering through the Milltown Wing in the National Gallery of Ireland, looking at paintings from the Romantic era. The absent woman is restored and, more, her point of view is dramatised.

An interest in representational style and strategy is also evident in the work in The University. The proto-modernist, 19th-century realism of Manet and Degas is the dominant representational mode in the larger portraits. In fact, apart from that one portrait of Tong, Degas's drawings and studies, and occasional paintings, with an extraordinarily casual level of finish, are a major point of reference.

His study of a woman ironing is specifically quoted in her Ada, working at the deli counter. And, although Corcoran was unaware of it, her Emma and her Sister, a sensitive double portrait, echoes a little-known Degas double portrait of the sisters Elena and Camilla Montejasi-Cicerale. Chinese brush painting is also vitally relevant to the work.

Corcoran began with the idea of encounters between people who know nothing of each other. "I asked myself: where might Tong be from?" The balance of the exhibition is, in a sense, an answer to that question; it is an individual's world as imagined by Corcoran, landscapes of the mind.

The title piece is derived from a postcard depicting students strolling through the grounds of Suzhou University, and there are archetypal Chinese scenes of mountain gorges and torrents, dramatic peaks and high villages, also drawn from postcard images. Yet the underlying point of these scenes is our relative ignorance of them. We interpret them with preconceptions that may be misleading.

We see what we expect to see, Corcoran implies. In all likelihood what we see represents a generic idea of China or indeed Asia, and appearances can be deceptive, as they are in this case.

Much of the terrain in the images - The Divide and Strange Wall, for example - though resembling aspects of mountainous China, and stylistically presented as such, is not Chinese at all. In fact some of the places we see are in France.

Painting is, for Corcoran, a slower way of looking. Her practice of presenting us with pictures in the making, with constructed images that reveal the nuts and bolts of their structure, is a way of encouraging us to look again.

The University, an exhibition of paintings by Margaret Corcoran, is at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until Oct 21