A visual feast to whet all appetites

Belfast is filled with work - both inside and outside the festival - that leaves the audience wanting more, writes Aidan Dunne

It was, on the face of it, a simple plan. A day to sample as much of the Belfast Festival visual arts events as possible, plus a couple of exhibitions that do not, for one reason or another, form part of the festival. And, for the most part, it worked out okay, apart from one notable glitch and the fact that it turned out to be what felt like one of the wettest days in living memory. Trudging through a murky Belfast in the teeming rain tends to militate against a festival atmosphere, though one did encounter hardy souls en route, suitably garbed against the elements, who made the effort to track down one or other show.

They were greatly facilitated by the innovative Festival Gallery Map and Art Card, widely available. Use it as a guide to get you from gallery to gallery, have it stamped at each venue, and you become eligible to win a weekend in London for four, with passes to the Velasquez and Rodin exhibitions. By far the best attended exhibition, though, does not form part of the festival. It's the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition.

Because the Ulster Museum is out of action for refurbishment, the RUA this year occupies the Ormeau Baths Gallery. Its role as Northern Ireland's leading publicly funded contemporary arts space came to an abrupt end earlier this year when the Arts Council cut off funding. An RUA role in the Ormeau Baths future is envisaged. Perhaps the ACNI have looked at what happened in Dublin: the substantial overhaul of the RHA together with the advent of the Gallagher Gallery as a thriving venue for modern and contemporary art. In fact the RHA's current president, Stephen McKenna, was drafted in as adjudicator for some 14 awards.

Popular, even populist as it is, this year's RUA annual show suggests that there is some way to go yet. The organisation took advantage of the Ormeau's space to mount its largest exhibition to date. In fact, it is too large. There is a great deal of work on view that doesn't merit inclusion. This also means that the hanging is unimaginative and does better pieces no favours. And there are many better pieces.

Northern Ireland has always been proud of its painters, and TP Flanagan, Basil Blackshaw and David Crone are there to demonstrate why. It's not so clear that there is a rising generation to take on the mantle. Much wall space is given over to fairly empty gestures. Scale can expose weaknesses cruelly.

There are some interesting younger artists within the general academic tradition, though. Colin Davidson and Simon McWilliams work convincingly, if still a bit unevenly, on an ambitiously large scale.

Keith Wilson is impressive by any standard. Casting the net wider - that is, not confining origins to Northern Ireland alone and scale to large - there are many fine works including those by Maeve McCarthy, William Grace, Terence Gravett, Emma Connolly, Jim Manley, Andrew Dunlop, Christine Bowen, KK Godsee, Alan Daly, Colin Watson, Hazel Neill and Eamonn Robbins. Gillian Fulton, Kate Nolan and Emma Boyd all show good photographic works. Among sculptors, Graham Gingles and Willie Herron are outstanding.

Hazel Neill and Peter Neill share the Fenderesky Gallery with two solo shows, both photographic. His Not Gun series features a succession of gun-shaped objects, including a banana, a hand configured as a six-shooter, a stone and so on. He plays on the tension between images and how we are primed to read them. His Irish Parables offer deadpan tableaux of still life and landscapes taken from biblical parables. The work is intriguing and leaves you with the feeling that you'd like to see more of it.

Hazel Neill's Lumen documents aspects of a semi-demolished house. She likes the interplay between real and illusory spaces, but it is as if she hasn't quite sorted out an appropriate pictorial language for dealing with these ideas as yet.

Much of the work in Paul Seawright's Invisible Cities in the Naughton Gallery at Queen's has already been seen in the Kerlin Gallery, but there are additions. Seawright has consistently addressed anomalous, marginal urban spaces in his photographs, from the sites of sectarian murders in Northern Ireland to the strip of land adjoining the Peripherique in Paris. His Invisible Cities are another kind of unseen landscape, the unofficial neighbourhoods building up around some of the fastest growing cities in the world, including Lagos, Lusaka and Addis Ababa. Seawright is oblique and dispassionate in his approach, aiming to photograph the spaces between conventional photo opportunities.

The titles, too, are flat and minimally informative. Bus. Bridge is one of the most striking images on view. Small, battered yellow buses negotiate elaborate fly-overs against the distant prospect of a concrete cityscape. Around the pillars supporting the motorways, communities have sprung up. In the midst of heaps of rubbish, people have set up homes and even keep animals in pens improvised from scrap wood. Several different worlds are layered one on the other in this complex picture.

Felix Anaut, described as one of Spain's foremost artists, is showing No Hay Camino, Se Hace Camino Al Andar (There are no paths, one makes paths by walking) at ARTTANK on the Lisburn Road.

His work is gestural and calligraphic, employing terse, schematic symbols and broad swathes of earth hues. He recalls the gritty, textural visual poetry of Tapies or Barcelo, but in a somewhat watered-down vein. He has a certain verve, but lacks the extraordinary authority and eloquence that Tapies, particularly, can bring to a surface.

At the Old Museum Arts Centre, Paul McKinley's So long and thanks for all the snow features two paintings and one graphic work. All depict urban parks, so that they are in a sense representations of representations of nature. McKinley uses a painstakingly precise technique, working the pigment, for example, in a regular pattern of jagged dots, not that far removed from Seurat's pointillism. There is an uncanny stillness about the scenes he describes. They are absolutely frozen in time, and devoid of any hint of animal or insect life.

Yet oddly, one effect of this is to generate a sense of expectancy, as though something is about to happen at any moment. It is in all a good show, very well installed in a small but surprisingly appealing space.

Belfast's newest venue, The Third Space, run by Hugh Mulholland, is also smallish but very well appointed in an office block, the Scottish Mutual Building on Donegall Square. There, Mary McIntyre's Veil consists of a series of photographic landscapes. The title may well refer to the mist that is present in all bar perhaps one, Flooded Tree, in which a tree seems to grow out of the water of a lake. McIntyre is best known for her images of deserted institutional, functional spaces, like canteens and council chambers, and deserted public spaces by night.

Her concern with what we cannot see, or what is not seen, continues in her landscape work. The flooded tree in the clearest image refers to a landscape by Corot. In other words, we see the landscape through the veil of cultural representations. Our ideas of nature seem to slip away, to elude our gaze in her exceptionally atmospheric studies of a moody, ambiguous terrain.

Tanya Marcuse's Undergarments and Armour at Belfast Exposed is a disconcerting and terrific exhibition. It has already formed the substance of a prize-winning book of the same title. Her idea is very simple and extraordinarily effective in execution. With the aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she toured archives and museums in England and the United States, "photographing undergarments, armour, and the museum forms that populate the storerooms - objects like breastplates, helmets, corsets, bustles, mannequins and dress forms".

She sees these various objects almost as forms of organic carapaces, exoskeletons that have outlived their inhabitants and survive as traces, moulds of their bodies. Indeed many of them explicitly recall aspects of the natural engineering of animal anatomy and may in many cases have been inspired by natural examples.

The kernel of Marcuse's inspiration, to juxtapose apparent opposites - hard-soft, external-internal, public-private - turns out to be brilliant. Undergarments and armour are revealed to have much more in common than one might initially suppose.

One of the most fascinating things about the work is that it throws up all sorts of ideas. There is no one definite conclusion. As Marcuse notes, undergarments designed to promote a façade of sexual attraction can seem coldly architectonic "divorced from the body's lingering presence", while armour can be sensually and aggressively sexual. Her small, black-and-white images are exceptionally sensitive to the material.

Artist Exchange International was established in the aftermath of 9/11 as one way of opening artistic dialogue internationally. Through Our Eyes at the Metro Building on Donegall St features work by 14 New York artists as part of an exchange that brought the work of 14 Belfast-based artists to New York. There is a huge range of approaches on view in what never amounts to a coherent thematic show: but then, that was not the intention.

In a low-key way, Barbara Friedman comes across as a beautiful painter, very subtle and understated. Ross Neher's hard-edged grids are defensive structures, designed to deter and protect. Katy Martin's painted body revisits aspects of action painting. Bill Brand's video is a resourceful account of body-centred experience, drawing on a family history of kidney disease. Robert Janz's twig sculptures are elegant constructions.

This being the real world, not everything worked out smoothly. The last stop, John Kindness's show at the Switch Room, was reached after a spectacularly wet trudge through driving rain, across the traffic conduit of Great Patrick Street, to find that the exhibition times printed on both the gallery map and the festival programme erred on the side of optimism. The lights were on but the doors were closed, and banging on them did no good. Another time, perhaps.

The RUA Annual Exhibition continues until Nov 4; details of Belfast Festival Exhibitions are available in the festival programme and the gallery map