Talent bursting out of the frame

The Arts: A number of strong visual arts exhibitions at Éigse offer equally innovative work, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic.

João Penalva's R, the centrepiece exhibition of Éigse, is a multimedia installation and, in its incarnation in the Old Presentation Convent Chapel in College Street, Carlow, is also a terrific feat of installation. It's hard to imagine a more sympathetic, atmospheric setting for what is an exceptionally slow, moody, indirect work. If anything, it's even more effective than in its original home in a Venetian palazzo as part of the 2001 Venice Biennale. R (for Richard) is in effect an extended meditation on ideas related to and arising from Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

Penalva marshals masses of documentary material and displays it in dramatically dim, broken light, in vitrines and hanging on fabric-draped walls. Three video projections occupy different spaces.

One focuses on an athlete in the middle of a competitive routine. The other two offer fixed images, one of a large bonfire blazing on a wooded hillside, the other a serene view across a Swiss lake at evening. Letters are read over both these images.

The letters are notionally written by an engineer on the point of retirement and the woman he is married to. The content refers to Die Meistersinger and other Wagnerian ideas but also, on the engineer's part particularly, brings in some rambling, ostensibly reflective but in fact smugly self-regarding autobiography.

One develops a certain sympathy with the woman who didn't encourage him to settle down at home in a desk job rather than keep wandering the world fulfilling his symbolically charged task of building bridges.

Penalva is musing on competition and legitimacy. The protagonist of Die Meistersinger triumphs against the rigid pedantry of the guild but also reinvigorates it. Wagner was an advocate of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, an all-encompassing artwork, inspired by the example of Greek tragedy.

The multi- media installation, particularly the blockbuster versions that tour the international art fair circuit, is a contemporary incarnation of the Gesamtkunstwerk. But Penalva pointedly fragments and makes problematic his own potential Gesamtkunstwerk, though the rationale doesn't quite excuse its longueurs.

One of the best sections is a tragi-comic though genuinely poignant interlude in which he documents the saga of Portugal's entry in the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest. The entrants made the mistake of taking the contest seriously in that they entered an idealistic composition, critical of the then totalitarian government, but they were shunned anyway because they were identified with the regime.

As a tribute to the late Dick Joynt, the sculptor who died last year, Éigse is hosting a small retrospective of his drawings and prints. He is best known as a stone carver, and he came to have the look of a stone carver: solid, statuesque, implacable - but always good-natured, engaging and communicative. His drawings too have the appearance of being sculptor's drawings.

That is, for the most part they are made quickly and incisively, with a certain roughness and great vitality, as though Joynt is looking for something related to sculpture through doing them, rather than making them as finished things in themselves. Something else happens when it comes to print.

His thematic series of linocut prints made in the 1970s reveal a subtle feeling for graphic design. They are clever and likeable.

An Éigse innovation this year is Platform 059 a showcase for five Carlow artists. All acquit themselves well and all make thoughtful, readily accessible work.

Emer Fitzpatrick uses natural imagery as metaphors for the body, illness and healing; Desiree Flynn's photographic exploration of the sugar factory is a reflection on memory and representing the past; Ciaran Ó Nualláin's film consists of remarkable footage of light on water; Gillian O'Shea's sculptural installation sets about redefining our perceptions of everyday objects; and Helen Dalton's portraits of school children are exceptionally sympathetic.

This year's Open Submission exhibition, selected by artist and Editor of Circa magazine Peter FitzGerald, features some outstanding work, including two fine pieces by award winner Anthony Lyttle.

It's good to see many familiar names among the exhibitors, a recognition of the status of Éigse.

Among pieces that impressed in a hugely varied, though generally strong selection were those by Malachy Costello, Catherine Fitzgerald, Peter Monaghan, Lily O'Rourke, Maria Levinge and Hugh McMahon.

The sequence of solo shows throughout St Patrick's College has long been a mainstay of Éigse, and this year is no exception.

The individual photographic prints that make up David O'Mara's Days of Nothing are at first glance perplexing. They seem random and most have an instantly recognisable snap-happy, casually inept quality. Then there are the odd scratches and burns that scar the surfaces of many. O'Mara works with found images, discarded negatives that he prints up and discovers.

The extraordinary thing is that we can experience a real familiarly with what emerges. We instinctively understand not only the conventions of photographic representation that characterise the images, but also the social and cultural conventions that make up their subject matter. The individuals in the images are strangely interchangeable, they could be you or me. O'Mara creates a disturbing document, a work that raises and undercuts expectations.

Of the painters, Mary Lohan's multi-panelled seascapes look particularly well, benefiting from uncluttered hanging, an antidote to a tendency towards lining work up on the wall too densely.

Keith Wilson's muted, pared-down landscape studies are also impressive, though he is unfairly confined to a difficult exhibition space.

Ger Sweeney's sharp, stylish abstracts recall the European offshoots of Abstract Expressionism. Mark O'Kelly's working drawings are speculative examinations of how coherent images are transmitted and constituted as pieces of layered information.

Cormac O'Leary's stylised interiors and cityscapes, infused with light and colour, are augmented by several accomplished studies of nudes in interiors.

A young artist, Sheenagh Geoghegan, has a highly promising stab at a well-worked abstract vernacular. Christine Mackey presents some fading, fugitive traces of anonymous family photographs.

Maoliosa Boyle's investigation of the story behind an unused wedding dress is cleverly presented in a short narrative video. Laila Pakalnina's film Papagena shows us a series of individuals responding to Mozart's music before we hear it ourselves.

There is a sober, didactic quality to the works in Road Movies, and indeed to Matthew Buckingham's Amos Fortune Road, but they all reward attention.

Ros Kavanagh's composite photographs of the people employed in local industries and their work environments, displayed in shop windows through the centre of town, make up a thoughtful, illuminating intervention.

Éigse Carlow 2004 Exhibitions, at St Patrick's College, Old Presentation Convent Chapel, Institute of Technology, Daily 11 a.m.-7 p.m., until June 20th. Tel: 059-9140491