There's an art to being misunderstood

Visual Arts: Reviewed - Incorrigible, Sentimental, curated by Merlin James, Eye Candy, Amy O'Riordan and From a South Facing Family, John Byrne

Incorrigible, Sentimental, curated by Merlin James, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until August 6, 01-6709093

Eye Candy, Amy O'Riordan, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until August 6 01-8740064

From a South Facing Family, John Byrne, Fenton Gallery, Cork, until July 23 (thereafter on view in edited form until August 12), 021-4315294

When the invitation for the Kerlin Gallery's Incorrigible, Sentimental arrived, the thought occurred that the curator Merlin James might have invented the painter Serge Charchoune. Just made him up, as the novelist William Boyd did a few years back with his apocryphal "lost" Abstract Expressionist called something like Nat Tate.

In a brief introduction to the exhibition, James weaves Charchoune - a little too neatly? - into the early 20th-century Paris of Dada, Cubist and Purist movements. A first encounter with the paintings - small, remarkably pristine, even the frames appearing as new - encourages suspicion. They reflect aspects of the various movements without inclining decisively towards any.

As it happens Charchoune is a real, historical figure - a Franco-Russian artist, born in 1889, who travelled to Paris around 1912, spent the first World War years in Barcelona and then became involved in Dada back in Paris. He wrote, contributing to several progressive journals of the time and even publishing his own for many years. He became increasingly interested in exploring the relationship between art and music. He died in 1975. The show's title comes from his description of himself. James likes Charchoune's wide-ranging curiosity, that he is "at once abstract and figurative" and that he was never quite assimilated into any group of movement, that he remained somehow himself.

Around a small group of Charchoune's heavily-worked, intensely-coloured paintings, James has built an exhibition based on this idea of stubborn apartness, as exemplified in the work of five contemporary painters. They share, he says, "a disabused reaffirmation" of painting and a willingness to be misunderstood or misinterpreted. Perhaps the best known of these is the American painter Sylvia Plimack Mangold, whose earlier, very rationalised investigations into the mysteries of representation had an overtly conceptual air. More recently she has felt free to drop these self-conscious trappings and make straight representations of, mostly, trees - the same few trees painted repeatedly throughout the seasons.

Her paintings in watercolour or oil are beautiful, and beautifully made and, more, they are terrific pieces of pictorial organisation. That is, the rigour, the concern for questioning every stage of the process and the image are still there, though implicitly. There is a conceptual fillip to Sam Fisher's diptychs as well. Pairs of enigmatic objects, indicated by scraping into monochromatic grounds of paint, are strangely shadowed by smaller, not quite identical copies. His aim doesn't seem to be the well-tried one of questioning the idea of authenticity and the original, and the effect is genuinely interesting.

Robert Bordo offers painted collages of generic landscapes, like pin boards filled with overlapping postcards. Yet his works are nicely integrated and cohesive, and he has a deft touch. James argues that Clive Hodgson - who makes very spare, linear, gestural compositions that recall some British painting of the 1940s or 1950s - makes painting "difficult" again, which seems slightly too bold a claim. Equally, his espousal of Amanda Thesiger's thoroughly pleasant, muted, ambiguous compositions is in the end fuzzily ambiguous itself. But he has made a substantial, rewarding show that merits considered attention.

Self-portraits have been a central to Amy O'Riordan's carefully staged photographic work from the start. One of her earliest images has her, camera in hand, against a background of sun-drenched holiday villas in Spain. In her best known image she sits astride a carousel horse. Eye Candy, at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, includes several new self-portraits. In fact she is the exclusive human subject in the show. All Sorts, with no direct human content, is a still-life with a difference: it features just an expanse of fashion shoes, fetishistically relished.

This sense of individual, prized consumer objects comes across again and again in the images, but it is echoed by another, related idea - that of an endless proliferation of objects. Appetite is endless, and desire is never satisfied. Hence the evocation of excess. The shoes make up an all-over composition that may extend indefinitely. In Shoe Emporium O'Riordan links the shoe to the body and desire, as she links the bag in Bustier, and brightly colours sweets in the show's title image, Eye Candy.

Then, the body itself is the object in Fragments, in which a nude figure sits amid a plethora of fragmentary images of herself. Rather than being about self-image per se, this surely has to do with the commodification of the body in imagery. Witness the incredibly lucrative marketing of the body images of page three models. With tremendous verve and considerable pictorial flair, O'Riordan is observing a culture in which Abi Titmus, for example, can emerge as a remarkably effective exploiter of her own image.

John Byrne's From a South Facing Family at the Fenton Gallery draws together many of his major works from the last 10 years. Best known as the instigator of the Border Interpretative Centre in 2000 - sited on the Louth/Armagh border and stocked with thematic souvenirs - Byrne has a superb comic imagination and the timing of a born performer. He has used satire as a means of dealing forcefully with the greater madness of the Troubles and the psychology of the strange place that is Northern Ireland.

In photo-text pieces of an essentially documentary nature, he makes clear that the everyday political and social realities are positively surreal. With his much admired vox-pop video, he asked passers-by Would you die for Ireland?, which introduces a note of harsh reality into the idealisations of patriotism. The show also includes his most recent work, a Cork City Council commission, Believers, another video in which, as the archetypal artist, he and a nude model, Jennifer Walls, recite a litany of artistic dogma as though saying a prayer. His work is hugely entertaining and quietly incisive.