THIS year the organisers of the Boyle Arts Festival exhibition decided that the format and rationale of their annual show needed a change, as no doubt it did. Most things settle into a mould very quickly, art exhibitions in particular, and from there it is a relatively short step to repetition and, ultimately, towards boredom.

So this year, a cadre of chosen, established (though not Establishment) artists were asked to exhibit a core of their own work and to name a young artist to show with each of them. The average number of works on display is half a dozen, and a strictly limited number of people was asked, so avoiding the relative over crowding which had drawn some criticism of late.

Brian Ballard shows with Ryan Weir, a young Northern painter; Basil Blackshaw with Nicola Robinson; Charles Brady with Oliver Comerford; Carey Clarke with Tom Molloy; Barrie Cooke with Bernadette Kiely; William Crozier with Taffina Flood; Sean McSweeney with Fiona Joyce; Carolyn Mulholland - with Barry Callaghan; Vivienne Roche with John Reardon; and there is a special memorial section for Alexandra Wejchert, a regular at Boyle until her death. She is paired off with Naomi Brosnan, whom she had chosen once for an RHA banquet exhibition. A few other artists have been asked to exhibit alone, including the sculptors Melanie le Brocquy and John Coen. Three others, Rosemary Mitchell, Geraldine O'Neill and Margaret O'Sullivan, exhibit in nearby shop windows, an initiative which seems to have worked out fairly well.

One result of all this is that the sculpture is exceptionally strong, unusual in Irish group shows. Wejchert, Mulholland, Roche, Melanie le Brocquy, Coen made a very formidable - and strongly varied core of talent and the first two, in particular, are present in strength. Barry Callaghan's works, all in bronze, vary in style but are inventive and faintly surreal, slightly macabre though with a certain zany, whimsical humour. John Reardon works interestingly in mixed materials, including an effective use off mirrors.

Ryan Weir's paintings are a little coarse in handling, but bold and ambitious in their imagery; the charcoal drawings are more accomplished. Nicola - Robinson, by contrast, paints - neatly coolly and colourfully, on a small scale and within set limits. Oliver Comerford's Rail Series seemingly relates to impressions glimpsed from a moving train and it functions very effectively as a sequence (incidentally, it seems to me what they would be almost equally effective in book form).

The paintings of Tom Molloy, familiar from the Rub icon Gallery, demonstrate how what are almost old fashioned trompe l'oeil effects can still yield individual results. The Sea Painting of Bernadette Kiely, in almost Auerbachian impastoes, is Expressionist and powerful, and there is an equivalent sense of paint in the small, intense pictures of Fiona Joyce. Taffina Flood shows highly accomplished graphic works on nature themes, while Naomi Brosnan is more convincing in her small, individual etchings than in her paintings, which suggest more than they achieve.

For me, however, the highlights of the painting section came from Barrie Cooke (his Lough Key Island series is outstanding), Basil Blackshaw and Sean McSweeney. These last two appear to be on a roll creatively and neither shows any tendency at all to sit happily on past achievements; they continue to move on.

. Runs until August 4th.