An emphatic end of an era for Éigse

VISUAL ARTS:This year's Éigse exhibition is as impressive as the new Visualise arts centre emerging in Carlow town's centre

BESIDE ST PATRICK'S in Carlow, the formidable outline of Visualise, the town's new cultural centre, is fast taking shape (it's scheduled to open next year). But for now, St Patrick's and the Institute of Technology on the Kilkenny Road remain the main visual-arts venues for the Éigse Carlow Arts Festival.

The role of the IT has varied year to year, and this year it features a substantial show, Singing the Real, curated by Royal Hibernian Academy director, Patrick T Murphy. He also selected a particularly generous exhibition from open submission which, with Platform 059(which highlights local artists), occupies a large swathe of the IT's ground floor.

Singing the Real, to complicate matters slightly, comes to Carlow under the auspices of Visualise rather than Éigse, and it was originally designed for Cape Town in South Africa, where it was seen last year. It includes work by 10 artists and it is very effectively if tightly installed in the IT.

Murphy's rationale was to consider artists whose practices overlap or interact in some way with scientific method or scientific subject matter. It's a timely idea, as the existence of TCD's Science Gallery indicates, or indeed the growing emphasis on what is termed, sometimes loosely, research, in virtually all areas of cultural endeavour.

To begin with the real, and the mixture of observation and singing apparent in the work of both Barrie Cooke and Nick Miller. The former has described himself on occasion as a Romantic, yet he is a Romantic who goes with the evidence, and his pollution paintings, particularly, highlight his commitment to dealing with the world as it is. Equally, Miller's landscapes, with their staggering profusion of detail, speak of a rural world that is almost frightening and overwhelming, but also entirely recognisable and beautiful despite itself. Susan Tiger's drawings use natural phenomena to generate pattern in precise acts of observation that in ways echo John Constable's paintings of skies.

Cecily Brennan finds metaphors for emotional life in the language of science, while Grace Weir has tended more and more to look at the history of the tradition of empirical inquiry. Similarly, Dorothy Cross's works combine straightforward observation with an interest in the layers of cultural and social meanings generated through the interactions of humans with the world around us.

Relational aesthetics come into play in projects by Garrett Phelan and Neva Elliott - there's a practical pay-off to the latter's work in that proceeds from Mellon Homes, the publication she has produced, go towards building a house in South Africa. Martin Healy, long interested in superstition and urban myths, shows a memorable variation on Goya, with a hooded bird of prey symbolising The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. John Gerrard's Smoke Tree, present in the show in the form of a working prototype, is eerily beautiful, an allegory of time and fossil fuel.

EACH YEAR, IN St Patrick's, an exhibition is given over to the work of one artist and this year, painter Hock-Aun Teh is featured.

Malaysian-born and Scotland-based, Teh's cultural identity is further complicated by the fact that in terms of work and sensibility he is probably more Chinese than anything. He sees himself as emerging from a Chinese tradition of calligraphic brush painting. He certainly makes linear, gestural marks, calligraphic in nature, though usually on a large scale and embedded in thick masses of pigment in an emphatically painterly rather than graphic fashion. Chinese brush painting meets American abstract expressionism is a crude way to put it, but gets the general idea across.

Emphatic is a good word because his work is emphatic, full stop. It is made with ferocious drive and attack, so much so that the information that he is a martial-arts master (and has even devised his own system, Tukido), comes as no surprise. This is not to say that the paintings embody aggression or violence, it's more that they are hugely energetic and spontaneous in expression, featuring wild, unmediated vortices of paint. In this they recall the work Nick Miller made on a broadly similar basis, applying the lessons of t'ai chi.

Teh plunges into each painting and, it seems, lets what happens, happen. Nevertheless, he does make decisions along the way, particularly relating to colour. His palette is odd in that it consists mostly of primary colours, so things can get very noisy, chromatically speaking. To say there is no subtlety is an understatement. One can admire him for really going for it, for trying to make work in a very specific, instinctive way, without being entirely convinced by the results.

The main group show in St Patrick's is We Don't Need Nobody Else, curated by Rob Lowe. To his credit, he has put together work exemplifying something he recognises but cannot quite put into words: namely paintings, mostly, that are clearly engaged with the real, but the real as transposed to a dreamy, meditative register, filtered through the deep subjectivity of experience. So we have Andrjez Jackowski's evocation of a malleable, dreamlike space in which memories are transformed into a personal language and simple events and settings take on an epic, mythic quality, in a way that brings Kafka to mind, all conveyed in a stylised, graphic visual idiom.

Paul Becker draws on fairytales in his paintings, which use the image of a huge bear. Anna Bjerger's set of imaginary portraits, Portrait of a Man, comes across as being a bit disturbing in the way it runs through a sequential, identikit remodelling personality, though technically the pieces are not as sharp as they aspire to be.

Vanessa Donoso López ambitiously recreates an hallucinatory personal world in the form of a domestic-scale space. Steven Aylin's grid-based pieces are more abstract but equally persuasive in describing the process of a mind putting its own order on the world.

Justin Mortimer's disturbing paintings are representational but disjointed, featuring unexplained lacunae so that we glimpse fractions of unsettling scenes. They come across as being related to the current movie genre featuring usually western travellers coming to grief in exotic locales. Erica Eyres also has the capacity to disturb, though is more satirical in her approach.

UPSTAIRS IN A fine exhibition space in St Patrick's are two huge paintings by Gordon Cheung. They are packed with imagery and detail, but are also incredibly laboured and murkily unattractive for no apparent reason. Overall, though, Lowe's show is agreeably enterprising and keeps us guessing.

Patrick T Murphy's extensive selection of submitted works runs to 150-pieces-plus, or about 30 percent of the total, a generous proportion by most measures.

Of course, not all of them are going to be first rate. But we should admire his curatorial stance as reflecting the spirit of open submission and allowing as many artists as possible an audience.

This is not to say that he's uncritical. He provides a fairly critical foreword to his selection in the catalogue. What he has done is to try to fairly represent what was on offer, and there is a good deal on offer.

It's good, for example, that so many established artists took the chance of rejection and consigned work. Among the notable exhibitors, in no particular order, are Niall Naessens (whose Rain over Kish Bankis a brilliant print), Gerard Casey, Sinéad Dowling (great photographs), Beatrice O'Connell (a terrific study of a baby), Julie Merriman, Margo McNulty, Patrick Horan, Hilary Elmes, Majella Clancy, Orla Bates, Clodagh Kelly, Colm Desmond, Cathy Callan, Lorraine Wall, Alice Peillon, Brian Garvey, Anthony Collins, Gillian Lawler (an outstanding painting), Eoin Mac Lochlainn and Eileen MacDonagh, who is virtually the only person to show an ambitious sculptural piece.

It's interesting that by no means all these names are familiar. Next year, various factors permitting, Éigse should be installed in the new Visualise galleries. In the meantime, the visual strand of Éigse 2008 more than merits a visit.

• Éigse Carlow Arts Festival Exhibitions continue at St Patrick's, Carlow IT and other venues until Sunday.  www.eigse-carlow.ie