Drawing with decadent designs

Visual Arts/Reviewed: The Square Root of Drawings, Temple Bar Gallery until Dec 2 (01-6710073); Getting on mother's nerves, Mother's tankstation until Dec 23 (01-6717654) Drawing is a Verb. Drawing is a Noun, Stone Gallery until Nov 20 (01-6711020).

It is generally assumed that standards in drawing began to decline when it was elbowed out of its place in the art school curriculum a few decades back. Thereafter the practice of drawing seemed to be under threat as Western society took to the mouse and the keyboard: it looked as if CAD and other computer programmes might make drawing obsolete. All of which goes some way towards explaining the huge resurgence of interest in drawing over the past five or six years. It's as if its apparently endangered status made it sexy and vaguely subversive, as witness the growth of graffiti art.

Surely it's also true, though, that drawing remains a fundamental human activity, and a crucially useful one, something reflected in the Gallagher Gallery's show some years back, Drawing Thinking. Like speech and writing, drawing aids and crystallises thought. It's not a recreational or decorative addition. It's also enduringly valid as an art form in its own right. Just have a look at Holbein's portrait drawings, on view at Tate Britain, and it's immediately clear that they are complete statements in themselves, and could not be as beautiful, illuminating and compelling as they are in any other form.

At the moment there are, remarkably, three substantial group shows of drawing on in Dublin. The Temple Bar show is a huge undertaking. It features some 95 exhibits from Ireland and abroad.

More than 90 artists agreed to provide a piece to a uniform 12-inch square format. The criteria are stretched and tested: there are several animated drawings, for example, and even live action drawings, including Jaki Irvine's rather good Worm, in which an earthworm plays the part of a moving line.

Ninety-plus is a large number of artists to corral in one space, and the installation is brilliantly, if ruthlessly, designed, arranged in a linear grid pattern. It is completely absorbing because the artists have thrown themselves into the task with real commitment, and their responses are hugely diverse, so that every single piece demands a real level of attention. It's as if you have to enter into each artist's world to properly see the drawings.

There are densely worked virtuoso pieces such as Paul Flannery's Viva Last People and spare, laconic efforts, such as Atsushi Kaga's bunny drawing. And CAD plays a role. Corban Walker uses it straightforwardly, and rightly, as a tool of the trade in his intricately patterned composition. All of which is very user-friendly and enjoyable. But is there an underlying agenda to the show? Not really, seems to be the answer. Curator Noel Kelly does target three views of drawing on the part of the artists: as primary practice, as one aspect of varied practice and as a preparatory medium. But none of this is obtrusive and the show is never dryly theoretical or didactic. Not everything is top notch, but there are many exceptionally good pieces.

Getting on mother's nerves has a subtitle that indicates its general focus - Psychological drama and contemporary drawing - and the curators, Finola Jones and David Godbold, also cite a common fascination with work marked by an air of "hovering malevolence". Their show, then, is relatively specific, and they have assembled a great line-up of artists who pretty much deliver on the dystopian promise, starting with a note of subtle unease, a later impression from a Rembrandt plate depicting Eve tempting Adam with the apple of knowledge.

From there on, of course, it's downhill all the way for humankind.

Adam Dant literally pictures dystopia, a vision of decadence in which obscenities replace their habitual euphemisms in a culture of endless commodification. We are warned off the pastoral possibilities of Gary Coyle's forest landscape by the information that it is actually a crime scene. The prolific detail of the woodland in his excellent, richly textured charcoal drawing has the ominous potential to harbour evidence of misdeeds. Coyle is relatively unusual in that he is an artist who has placed drawing at the centre of what he does (he is also included in the Temple Bar show).

Mother's tankstation also features a substantial selection of work by Raymond Pettibon, an enormously influential graphic artist whose fragmentary, cryptic and oblique drawings with texts employ a huge range of cultural references to provide quizzical commentaries on a world that is itself full of contradictions and surreal juxtapositions.

It's worth a trip to the tankstation to see his work alone, but there is much more worth seeing as well, including Coyle, Dant, the Royal Art Lodge and others. The show also scores highly in terms of its installation, taking its cue from Pettibon's way of displaying his drawings in irregular clusters.

In fact, of the three drawings shows, the Stone Gallery's is the most conventional in terms of display, though it is ambitious in its scope including, for example, work by Gail Dunlop based on the oddly close relationship between RAF airfields and the English country house ideal. It hinges on a vast outline of a Vulcan bomber cut into an East Anglian lawn and incorporates video, photography and a printed, illustrated book. Kate Betts, by contrast, emphasises traditional skills in her intensely observed drawings, and she demonstrates that such an approach offers a valid means of lively exploration.

The Stone Gallery show is international in its scope and is an impressive achievement, not least in venturing into site-specific pieces, including those by Gerda Teljeur, whose graphic work is a vital part of her output - photography, film, sketchbooks, and the landscape itself. One of the impressive things about the gallery generally is its penchant for showcasing younger Irish artists, and it does just that in the current exhibition.