All changes, but stays the same

This year's RHA annual exhibition is a convincing blend of conservatism and progression, writes Aidan Dunne.

You have to change to stay the same. Against the odds, the RHA annual exhibition remains, in terms of visual art, the hottest ticket in town. It's keenly anticipated among the gallery-going public, and its open submission section attracts a huge entry among artists. For some, its position as the annual art event goes without saying, just as for others it is by definition a pointless celebration of artistic conservatism and mediocrity. Somewhere between these two received opinions, the exhibition has managed to reinvent itself, navigating its way between the Scylla of complacency and the Charybdis of irrelevance. It has managed to change and hence, in vital respects, to stay the same.

Some of the more established academicians have been heard to reflect sagely that, in time, people come around to the academy, in the sense of overcoming their prejudices and seeing the light. This is not quite the case. If the academy had remained as it was, it could not attract the range of artistic talent currently represented in the exhibition. The evidence is there in the shape of some of the work that formerly exemplified the essence of the term academic, work by both academicians and non-academicians. That is, conservative mediocrity is still evident.

Yet, with not a little prompting and persuading, the RHA has benefited from the advent of successive waves of Irish artists who have chosen to work in various modes of representation. Significantly, many of these artists have emerged on the scene at a time when, in the light of post modernity, the old antagonisms, exemplified in the polarity of the RHA and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, were becoming increasingly irrelevant. Abstraction wasn't necessarily progressive, nor representation conservative.

Other antipathies, more subtly political, notably that between the RHA and the Independent Artists, may have more enduring consequences but have also substantially faded. They were largely based on the identification of the academy with establishment values - its artistic values being inextricably bound up with social, religious and political values.

Portraiture was at the heart of this congruence of interests, and it could be argued that this is still the case. Witness that the Taoiseach's portrait - a very good one - was painted by an academician and is exhibited there. But the academician, RHA secretary James Hanley, is part of the younger, rising generation rather than a member of the old guard. Furthermore, Hanley is one of a number of artists who are not content to aspire to a fixed model of academic practice.

There is a spiky, provocative edginess to his work, a critical engagement with tradition rather than an acceptance of it. Not that this is strictly a question of age. The same could be said of Stephen McKenna, who has previously written very cogently on what the academy should be.

As viewers, our own relationship to a portrait of the Taoiseach in the academy is not what it would once have been.

There is Hanley's hard-edged realism, the stark blankness of the background and the fact that we see the image so soon after Bertie Ahern's appearance at the Mahon Tribunal. Hence the blankness and the stubborn set of the jaw have various, perhaps unintended, connotations.

As if to emphasise that the academy is no longer in the business of validating the status quo, it includes a set of images that echo a controversy it certainly didn't want - that over its exhibition of Michael O'Dea's portraits of inmates in Portlaoise. This time, Noel Bowler's photographs of inmates in cells in Mountjoy straightforwardly document another side of Ireland. It's not only the subject that is noteworthy in the context, it's also the medium. Photography has only recently been regarded as appropriate for inclusion and this year consolidates its position very convincingly.

Noteworthy are Anna Rackard's witty reworkings of picturesque postcard images and Veronica Nicholson's Christo-inspired Burren views. Their wrapped elements may refer to attitudes to heritage, but also to what we may look for in a place such as the Burren. Equally impressive are Amy O'Riordan, Kate Byrne, Ruth McHugh, Anthony Hobbs, Amelia Stein, Gary Coyle, Joe Murphy, Schildt, O'Neill and Attridge - and sculptor Vivienne Roche.

In the 19th century, portraiture formed a veritable industry for painters, an industry that had the stuffing kicked out of it by the invention of photography. So much so that it's surprising how it still thrives. There are several terrific examples apart from James Hanley's, among them an intense self-portrait by Maeve McCarthy, Michael O'Dea's formidable study of poet Micheal O'Siadhail, Geraldine O'Neill's excellent Gallery Man (a portrait of Kevin Kavanagh), Robert Ballagh's elaborate tribute to the artist Michael Farrell, and Oisin Roche's study of painter and draughtsman George Potter - who is obviously much in demand as a sitter. There's another portrait of him by Neil Shawcross, who also shows a study of Ted Hickey.

It's equally possible to highlight still life and find a diverse range of lively, excellent work. The first to strike the eye, as soon as you enter the Gallagher Gallery, are two large-scale compositions by Nathalie du Pasquier, fine examples of, in Donald Judd's phrase for an artwork, "local order". Jump down in scale to Jenny Richardson's precisely observed studies of mushrooms, up again to Philip Moss's quizzical, analytical A Pile of Nostalgia.

Here too the list could go on - Carey Clarke, Ruth O'Donnell, Comhghall Casey, John Long, Mark Pepper . . .

Let's not forget landscape. Virtuoso watercolourist T.P. Flanagan shows how at home he is with acrylic and oil in three outstanding pieces. Veronica Bolay's compositions are charged with a sense of the uncanny. Martin Gale's subdued views frame human dramas. Maria Simonds-Gooding is on top form, as is Sean McSweeney, who has one exceptionally spare Shoreline study. Frances Ryan shows just one little piece, also a shoreline, a terrific, vital study of Westport, comparable to Lorraine Wall's countryside study. Maria Levinge's atmospheric Evening is also effective and small. Working much larger, David King seems indebted to Peter Doig. Jonathan Hunter has an interesting painting and Sonia Shiel's beautifully textured Part Candy is among works that use landscape as a springboard.

Some outstanding pieces, some of which evade easy categorisation: David Crone's painterly Garden Objects, Diana Copperwhite's virtuoso Doll, Claire Kerr's pair of miniature tondi, close-up studies of grass, Alan Keane's Wave Glow. Plus works by Richard Gorman, Alice Peillon, George Potter, Taffina Flood, Olivia Musgrave, John Coyle, Liam Belton, Paul Mosse, Makiko Nakamura, Margaret O'Brien, Colin Harrison, Danny Osbourne, Brian Palm, Charlie Whisker and Jim Savage. That's not all. There is a lot there to discover, and a lot worth discovering.

The RHA Annual Exhibition is at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, 15 Ely Place, Dublin 2 until May 22nd