Putting on Ayres in Carlow

VISUAL ARTS/Aidan Dunne: St Patrick's College, the main visual arts venue for Éigse, is not a gallery, but as a series of exhibition spaces it is not half bad, once you get used to the distractions, architectural and institutional. The main room is particularly good and that is where, this year, you will find a substantial show of recent work by Gillian Ayres.

She is known for her big, thickly painted, brightly coloured, boldly patterned abstracts, which is a fair enough description of what we see at Éigse.

The work on view chronicles a development, or perhaps a cyclical progression of emphasis. The magnificent Bred of Summer Heat, painted in 2001, in which motif is heaped on motif, colour on colour, cumulatively fills out the composition space until the whole surface is filled with ripe, interlocking forms bathed in a warm light.

The Matisse-like Summerland, from this year, is more thinly painted, more sparsely composed and more inclined to separate out its network of shapes into something like a pattern of figure and ground.

The shapes are ambiguous but leave open associations with flowers and fruits. In smaller pieces, Ayres explores intermediate stages that emphasise the links between these complementary approaches. For the most part she creates compositions from very definite, evocative forms with a kind of playful deliberation that sometimes recalls Philip Guston.

Her work is hugely enjoyable, but it is also formidable. She is always a totally engaging painter, capable of leaps of thought that leave your eye struggling to catch up until, looking back over your shoulder you suddenly think: "Now I get it."

Michael Quane is a one-off, one of those quirky artistic individualists who turn up every now and then, with something approaching a visionary intensity about him. He is an obsessive stone-carver who, as Vera Ryan relates, sets about a block without preparatory drawings, maquettes or other aids and, like Michelangelo, proceeds to release the form from the stone. Quane is certainly a remarkably fluent and fluid carver and, over time, certain recurrent preoccupations have become evident in his work.

He often carves human, mostly male, figures in conjunction with animals. Whether the figure is straining to hold a dog upright, wrestling rather than riding a horse, or struggling with a serpent that girdles his waist, physical conflict is the rule. These writhing bodies do recall Michelangelo to some extent, but even more the classical marble Laocoon, which was such an influence on 16th-century Italian art. Quane's figures seem to be partly battling gravity and space, fighting their way into three dimensions, self-absorbed and in quite another world from ours.

His work also recalls aspects of Gothic and Romanesque sculpture, with its penchant for caricature, distortion and surreal humour. He recoils from the perfect physical types of classicism and seems to relish the description of bulging, sagging and rumpled flesh, and the expressive oddness of physical contortions. One plump figure sits astride what looks like a giant rubber duck. In another piece, he becomes absorbed in detailing a hand, which is left disproportionately large.

Because all these things are intrinsic to his vision, there is no question of whimsy detracting from the substance of his work. The oddness is what it's all about.

One of the nice things about Éigse is its habit of introducing names new to Ireland, and this year's notable find is the Oxford-born English artist Vanessa Gardiner. She has a highly distinctive way of working, often building up her compositions from several separate pieces of plywood, which are variously painted, sanded, buffed and repainted. The resultant surfaces, well-worked and segmented (though very effectively integrated), enjoy a sympathetic correspondence with the stretch of coastline which, Judith Bumpus explains in the catalogue, is the primary source of her inspiration.

This is a wild stretch of rocky terrain around Bostcastle in north Cornwall, which she first saw as a child and still revisits. The irregular blocks of wood merging to form harmonious wholes echo the way the coastline is formed by the faulting and erosion of massive rock formations.

Perhaps it is the level of Gardiner's engagement with the landscape that forestalls any hint of her paintings becoming too easily decorative. They could certainly be termed decorative (no bad thing) in that they are elegantly made and look good, amply repaying patient, repeated viewing.

There is also a note of undecorative austerity about them, though, in their restrained but eloquent palette of ochres, browns, greens, blues and black, and in their scoured, weathered quality. She also shows one terrific drawing in a long narrow format.

Samuel Walsh shows a substantial group of his border skirmish Ambit paintings. In these rigorously conceived abstracts, central spaces negotiate fractal-like boundaries with enclosing, peripheral spaces. They could be schematic accounts of sea and shoreline, or indeed of any comparable process, though Walsh himself, in a catalogue note, hints at a political dimension.

In a way, Jo Scanlon's thickly textured, gestural landscapes adopt as strict a methodology, but without the hard edges and precise rules of engagement. Her work has real conviction, her colour is appropriately subdued (so that when she hits the high notes, the effect is all the more striking), and some of the pictures, including Terracotta Coast and Red Earth, are very good indeed.

In his approach to landscape, John Brennan (at the Institute of Technology) is somewhere between Walsh and Scanlon. He employs a solidly engineered pictorial structure of interlinked oblongs, and builds in a sense of time passing with linear patterning and atmospheric, seasonal colouring.

His compositions are thoughtfully made and bear sustained attention. More abstract, Barbara Freeman's paintings also depend on a strong, methodical structure on which she overlays organic, lyrical elements. Sculptor Don Cronin creates interesting hybrids between natural and synthetic forms, while David Dunne makes terse, compacted sculptures with references to the Holocaust.

Francois-Xavier Courreges shows three short films at the Institute of Technology. All bear some relationship to the performance art tradition of endurance, particularly Nous Avons Echove, in which we see a figure face down on the beach. As the waves wash over him, an initially idyllic scenario becomes progressively more fraught.

A pose of relaxation comes to seem more and more like an attitude of death. Courreges plays on our expectations cleverly and uses soundtracks particularly well, though I'm glad that Dancing for Joy, which has the subtitle (short version), wasn't any longer.

There are layers of artifice in Aidan McDermott's oddly realist pictures. Odd because while they are skilfully representational in a slightly mannerised way, they also have a theatrical quality to them, presumably because, like Poussin, he creates small tableaux of the scenes he depicts. In any case, his paintings look very well here.

Mary Theresa Keown's figures in interiors draw on the conventions of collage in that, although each one is a single, integral painted surface, it seems to emerge from the juxtaposition of several different images, conjoining disparate spaces and perspectives. It could easily seem contrived and laboured, but somehow Keown manages to carry it off with the necessary style and panache.

Campbell Bruce selected the open submission show, and it is impressively good. Highlights include a photograph of the Burren by Krisztina Dragoman and paintings by Judy Hamilton, Gillian Lawler (currently showing at Dublin's Cross Gallery), Maria Levinge, Lorraine Wall, Eamon Coleman, Mike Fitzharris and Kathleen Holohan.

Éigse always includes work by Carlow artists, this year selected by Eamon Coleman. Among several pieces worthy of note are those by Ellen Walsh, Mary Brennan and Elsie Nolan.