Different ways of seeing things

Visiual Arts: Reviewed - Caro Niederer Paintings, photographs and rugs, Douglas Hyde Gallery until Feb 16 (01-6081116) and Seeing is Believing curated by Jacqui McIntosh, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until Jan 14 (01-8740064)

Swiss artist Caro Niederer makes paintings from tourist postcards collected on her travels. The paintings are small, though larger than the cards themselves, and they are brightly coloured, simplified versions of the originals. She also makes larger works, based on "personal snapshots, taken at home and abroad".

These larger pieces could be described more as sepia wash drawings than paintings, consisting as they do of just a layer of diluted sepia coloured pigment, like the initial sketch for an oil painting. There are two further elaborations: when her paintings are purchased, Niederer photographs them in the homes or offices of their owners, and her paintings also form the basis for beautiful silk rugs.

All of these aspects of her activity are represented in the exhibition, which is relatively busy in a gallery known for its spare installations. It's striking that in at least one case - a little painting entitled School Boy II - Niederer's work has ended up in a home that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Douglas Hyde itself: raw concrete arranged in angular masses.

We see her painting, perched above a rather bleak-looking, bare hearth. You could say that, like a couple of other objects, the painting has a humanising effect on the room, something that might equally apply to the show as a whole in relation to the gallery.

In fact, perhaps a humanising impulse or effect runs through everything she does. She takes mass-produced postcards, part of a global tourist industry in which identity and experience are commodified, and makes something personal of them, tries to reclaim, to some extent, her own individual experience. Personal photographs, snapshots, are a common way of doing this as well. They are our own, authentic documents of experience, memories neatly preserved, often authenticating our own presence and participation in wider social frameworks.

Yet something of a reversal occurs with Niederer's treatment of her own photographs. By rendering them in sepia, it is as if she is pushing them further away, lending them a patina of distance and vagueness. This happens also with the woven rugs, in which the imagery becomes very stylised and flattened. If we look again at the smaller, coloured paintings in the light of the sepia work, it could be that a certain diminution is evident in them as well because, in remaking the images, she is oddly half-hearted, as though she doesn't quite have faith in their potential regeneration.

All of which brings to mind the paintings of Luc Tuymans. Their often pallid, hazy surfaces suggest that all that is left to us is a weakened, exhausted version of experience, something underlined by the fact that, as with Niederer, he draws on second-hand, printed photographic sources.

Niederer's sepia images too have a built-in quality of fading, as though memory is fast receding, the world becoming insubstantial and lost to us. Optically, their surfaces, which show evidence of having been worked quickly, offer approximations of photographic images rather than the scenes photographed. Could it be that there is a nostalgia, in Niederer's paintings, for the lost capacity of an image to embody meaning in a world that has been pervaded by images of every conceivable sort? Certainly, with the possible exception of the rugs, which are slightly unorthodox but also conventionally decorative, the work is, to resurrect a term coined by the critic Harold Rosenberg, anxious about its status in the world, unsure of its role with regard to experience. In that it reflects a common symptom of contemporary representation.

Seeing is Believing, curated by Jacqui McIntosh at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, is about representation, aiming to shuffle through a repertoire of current possibilities. McIntosh points out that painting, rather than being supplanted by photography, has appropriated it to its own ends. Several of the six artists whose work she has included use or relate specifically to photography and, as it happens, to cinema.

Hard to imagine the work of either Oliver Comerford or Stephen Loughman without cinema. Loughman's meticulous realism has a stylised, heightened quality partly to do with the nature of his subject matter, which is often a contrived environment of one kind or another, from waxworks to the interior of a flat. We cannot escape from the idea that we are looking at an arrangement of reality, a constructed image, and he plays with that fact in various ways and on several levels.

Comerford has absorbed something of the visual style and emotional vocabulary of road movies, in scenes of transience, isolation, distance and transition. There are echoes of Romanticism in the way he evokes our encounters with huge, impersonal environments, such as the expanse of an airport in his painting here. Mark O'Kelly uses photographic sources, often changing and manipulating them to produce untrue versions of otherwise true scenes. He also draws on the frozen narrative potential of images arbitrarily abstracted from their context. Margaret Corcoran's paintings consider representation in terms of artistic style. In a series of paintings following the progress of a young girl through the Milltown Room of the National Gallery of Ireland, she enacts a conversation between different modes of representation across the centuries.

Geraldine O'Neill draws on the European tradition of still life, concocting scenes of sensory excess. Given that she uses heightened colour and packs her compositions with brightly coloured food and toys, it may seem odd to point out that she is a subtle painter, but it is true, as her extraordinary skill and care with detail indicate.

Finally, there is Dermot Seymour, who paints in a hard, uncompromising realist style that is, oddly enough, un-photographic, though it has been described as photo-realist. His most recent project is to juxtapose sympathetic portraits of farm animals with less sympathetic portraits of the politicians whose decisions impact not alone on the animals but the people whom the animals might symbolise. Here, Mary Harney is the political subject.