Artists at work

The studio is where art is made and the gallery is where it's exhibited. That, at any rate, is the usual arrangement. Two examples that short-circuit this process come readily to mind. One is an exhibition currently showing in a small mews building in Leeson Close in Dublin; the other is the Artists' Work Programme at IMMA, where to a limited but significant degree visitors to the museum can see for themselves how artists go about their work. The Work Programme is a good idea with implications for both artists and public. The artists who win residencies in the eight studios at the Royal Hospital are effectively thrust into the front line. They must consider their work practices in the cold light of public scrutiny; the visitors, meanwhile, get a chance to see what exactly goes into something that they might have dismissed out of hand. Over 50 artists have occupied the studio block since 1994. They include established figures like Hughie O'Donoghue and Alice Maher, and a feature of the programme is the steady stream of applicants from abroad - three-quarters of the current submission. The other example, the show in the Leeson Close mews, specifically targets inexperienced artists. The building is called The Studio, and during the last year it has functioned as precisely that for two graduate painters from the NCAD, Colm Brady and Shane Synnott, courtesy of Tony and Linda Pilaro's CAP Foundation, which owns it.

Now, at the end of their year's residency, the artists are displaying some of the work they've made there. After that two of this year's painting graduates, selected by committee, will take their places. The Studio is a stylish, L-shaped two-storey building on a paved and gravelled courtyard, so tastefully finished and bristling with architectural detail that it must make a rather intimidating work environment - for making art can be a messy business. But in terms of facilities it is a dream, particularly for young artists facing that daunting moment of post-college transition.

There has been a certain amount of comment on the way the scheme targets painters, at a time when more and more fine art students are opting to work in other media. And one can see why. Not only because of the expanded range of media, but because painting is not at all a single, homogenous activity. It encompasses a huge range of divergent conceptual approaches. A cursory look at some of the exhibitions of painting around town is enough to confirm this. Take, for example, John Noel Smith's sumptuous, painterly abstracts at the Green on Red Gallery. They insinuate loaded symbols, a quirky, personal iconography, into a formal framework allowing him to treat subjects like the tangled knot of national identity in his Knot series, but also to deal with the painting process itself.

In their totality, his works are about ways we imagine, experience and order the world. The qualities of paint and painting are to the fore: the rich, concentrated colour and physical substance of pigment, the marks made by the brush. By contrast, John Doherty's Lightship paintings at the Taylor Galleries subordinate these qualities to the representational image. Technique is more or less invisible, devoted to convincing us of a seamless, photographic reality. A tension between the super-real quality of the image and its constituent brushwork engenders a certain frisson. The pictures are also full of intimations of duration. Doherty is a connoisseur of decay, delighting in rendering rust, peeling paint, weathering, the ravages of time on ordinary things.

While his paintings are objective, documentary accounts of workaday reality, Mark O'Neill's paintings, at the Frederick Gallery, veer close to pastiche in their evocation of a mellow rural idyll of genteel privilege. Everything about them, their soft-focus brushwork and anachronistic imagery, their sentimentality, even their titles (A Breakfast Legacy, Kitchens Bounty) is directed towards the construction of a received, reassuring image. And people are susceptible to such calculated nostalgia: his show was an instant sell-out. There is a certain common ground between Smith and Doherty. They may exemplify diametrically different ways of painting, but they both address questions of process and representation that have been active over the last few decades. O'Neill's work, though, is light years away. It is from a different conceptual world to theirs, and represents painting as a fixed, defunct form. Judging by their work in The Studio, Brady and Synnott are as different as Smith and Doherty, and their respective strategies are broadly comparable. Brady's work is process-driven. He takes sources, often to do with the body and a sense of self, and the landscape, and subjects them to vigorous transformation. Some hints of sources survive in titles and imagery, but he seems to want to end up somewhere else, allowing scant references to recognisable motifs. Fragmentary traces may remain, firmly embedded in a new landscape of tempestuous paintwork, generated through the process of interrogating the image until, as he puts it, there are no more options and the painting is finished.

There's a celebrated montage at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni's film The Eclipse. It is essentially a series of views of the street where the main protagonists, a man and a woman, have agreed to meet. Neither of them turns up. Antonioni shoots the location in their absence. Shane Synnott's paintings are a little like that: anonymous places, mostly devoid of human presence, with a feeling of emotional distance and transience. They are filtered through a photographic view of the world, reproducing photographic effects with slick painterly technique. His pictures are more effective en masse as if, one could almost say, they function like frames from a video. It does look as if he could well make a film or video along those lines. Brady, too, mentions the possibility of moving into video. It is hardly surprising that the move to other media has gained an extraordinary momentum in art schools, to the extent that one can imagine the pressure on students - not overtly from others but from inside their own heads - to work in other ways. Shane Synnott is quoted in the catalogue, for example: "In my last year in college, I spent a lot of time thinking about reasons I shouldn't paint, and couldn't paint. I went off on many tangents trying to find some meaningful way of working . . . then at the end of the year I realised I could have just painted. So this year in The Studio, I allowed myself to paint without worrying about it." Which is as neat an argument in favour of the CAP scheme as the Pilaros could wish for.

Colm Brady and Shane Synnott's work can be seen at The Studio, 36 Leeson Close until May 22nd.