Students short on ideas

FOR some years, the NCAD's degree exhibition, or rather its painting and graphic sections, have gone on show in the RHA Gallagher Gallery, where they fill not only two floors but much of the basement space.

The phrase "paintings and graphics" should be qualified, since conceptual, installation and video pieces have been fairly general for the past few years, and the trend is continued this year.

It is scarcely a vintage year, to be frank. Nowadays, we can take for granted a level of all round technical efficiency which did not exist a generation ago, so there are very few things in the present exhibition which are poorly made.

There is, however, a shortage of real ideas - admittedly not a commodity you expect to find on trees or dangling on railings. Yet, allowing for that, other recent annual NCAD exhibitions have been definitely fresher and livelier.

In particular, it seems to me that the lifespan of conceptualism/installationism is now running out fast. There probably never was more than a handful of people anyway - mostly Americans - who were genuinely creative in this field, and at this late hour the genre has become not only stale and repetitive but a bore.

Distracting clutter and pre tentious bric a brac, spaceage background noises flickering videos about nothing in particular, an all too familiar type of home movie which usually involves somebody doing a repetitive mime or trance like physical jerks before a camera - this has all been done over and over, literally ad nauseam.

The most interesting of this year's painters, I thought, are Colm Brady, Declan Clarke, E. Mary Doherty and Orla Whelan. Between them they cover a good deal of ground and a variety of styles and are all given good space. Nicholas Carey's suite of 33 drawings, entitled Dream Time, is also eye catching, though rather more impressive in total than in detail.

Paul Bommer's light hearted, almost cartoonish paintings teeter on the edge of kitsch but are saved by their very lack of pretence.

The big, swirling abstracts of Birgit Prachnow are vigorous if not highly original, while Brid McCarthy's etchings are competent and strong. The big screen prints of John Hearne are also well done, even if the result looks a little like Rauschenberg's collages.

Among those who fit into no very obvious category, Jessica Carson, Janine Davidson, Sandra Sullivan (whose "roam" with its webs of mazy lines does produce an authentic sense of vertigo) and Shane Synnott deserve mention.

In the conceptualist or quasi conceptualist bracket, I thought the most original pieces were by Susan Kelly and Joe O'Connor.