Cross-Border project makes a big, bold statement

Boyle Arts Festival proves a strangely appropriate home for the Royal Ulster Academy's annual exhibition, writes Aidan Dunne

Usually the Boyle Arts Festival features a substantial group exhibition of work by invited artists. This year, in something of an historic departure, it also incorporates the Royal Ulster Academy. While academicians from north of the Border have shown with the RHA in Dublin and, indeed, individually at Boyle and other group shows, the idea of the RUA exhibiting en masse at a regional venue in the south is something else again, and amounts to a particularly encouraging cross-Border initiative.

Artist Carol Graham, the current RUA president, points to past vice-president Bob Killen as being responsible for the initiative. It was he who approached Fergus Ahern, long the main mover behind Boyle's annual exhibition.

The background is that the Ulster Museum, normally the venue for the RUA's annual exhibition, is due to close to enable major alterations to the complex of buildings. But the Boyle show is not the RUA's annual show, which, apart from featuring work by academicians is also selected from open submission. That will now be held at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast.

The Ormeau Baths Gallery became an object of controversy earlier this year when it closed after the Arts Council of Northern Ireland abruptly withdrew funding. Many artists protested at the loss of Northern Ireland's main venue for contemporary art.

That it is to host the annual RUA show can only reinforce the suspicions of many that the ACNI's unstated agenda was to rein in the exhibitions policy of the Ormeau Baths and point it in a more conservative direction. On the other hand, Boyle's annual show is in many respects like an outlying version of the RHA Annual Exhibition, with a few different notes, and hence an appropriate home for the RUA. And so it proves.

Ahern is a persuasive and persistent organiser, witness the fact that the show features two new paintings by Basil Blackshaw, a bit of a living cross-Border initiative in himself, in that he is in the RUA and also an honorary RHA. Although much sought after, he is famously self-critical and wary about letting work out of the studio. One piece here, Cottage Window, is a development on a windows theme that has produced some brilliant paintings and does so again here.

Blackshaw uses the window as a metaphor for a painting or indeed any image, and directs our attention to what is not visible. We never see through the windows. They bring to mind the film director Michelangelo Antonioni's remark to the effect that he always distrusts images, because he is immediately drawn to imagine what is behind the image. "And what is beyond an image cannot be known." Though it is a landscape, his second painting, The Lough II, is not that far removed in spirit. We can dimly discern, through mist over water, the vague outline of something undefined, island or vessel or shore. Both are subtle, beautifully articulated works.

The RUA includes several painters who are well up to making big, bold, bravura representational paintings. They include Colin Davidson, whose cityscapes, made with great energy, are lively and atmospheric. Simon McWilliams's Office Ceiling, with its unorthodox angles and dramatic perspective, is a virtuoso piece of work. Joseph McWilliams, a past president of the academy, shows My Greenhouse, a visually engrossing painting (surely seen previously at the Ulster Museum) in which one end of the greenhouse virtually coincides with the surface of the canvas, so that it is as if we are directly against the glass, looking through.

Neal Greig, not an RUA, is also very good at dramatic, sweeping landscapes, usually involving water, and in his two works here he flirts with hackneyed imagery (sunset, watery reflections) but comes up with something fresh and lively. In its gestural immediacy, his work has a feeling in common with that of Donald Teskey, who shows one of his shoreline studies. The sea is also the subject of Mary Lohan's two fine panoramas, studies of light along the Wexford coast.

More distanced, analytical treatments of landscape are found in the work of Clement McAleer, Chris Wilson, Keith Wilson and David Crone. Chris Wilson continues his explorations of maps. In different ways, Keith Wilson and Crone have an almost forensic approach. The detailed ground of the former invited our closer scrutiny, while Crone's rows of plant forms are like a taxonomic project. McAleer's busy composition takes an Umbrian hillside as a starting point.

There are other interesting landscape painters, including Sheila McClean, Jean Duncan, and the ever reliable TP Flanagan. Fionnuala D'Arcy's small, densely worked studies of nature are delicately atmospheric. Julian Friers is specifically a bird painter, and a very good one, locating his Peregrine and Nightjar in their own worlds with an extraordinary sense of life. James MacIntyre is straightforwardly nostalgic with his evocation of a rural past. Abstraction, in this context, is a minority pursuit, but there are good examples from David Feeley and Natalia Black.

With some notable exceptions, the sculptural component is relatively unexciting, although if you like small, fairly obvious allegories and chunks of symbolism expressed in sculptural form you may find it all more to your taste. Among the best works, it's good to see the spare elegance of Eileen McDonagh's two carved granite pieces. The notched cone of Lifting Off is particularly good. And Betty Brown's wonderfully ramshackle animal composites, including a memorable dog, Ballycastle Barney, are very good, funny and engaging.

Melanie le Brocquy excels among the figurative sculptors, and Anthony Scott's animal figures are strong, while Cheryl Brown's works have a nice feeling of stubborn, ancient form about them. Best known as a sculptor or mixed media artist, Graham Gingles shows two strikingly good paintings, with a typical combination of uncannily precise observation and disconcerting strangeness. The edginess of his work, and Blackshaw's, in themselves make the show richly rewarding.

•The Boyle Arts Festival Exhibition 2006: Royal Ulster Academy (and invited artists) is at King House, Boyle, until Aug 7