Figuring Eigse out

There's no doubt that Sean Henry's figurative sculptures, which are both very ordinary and quite strange, steal the limelight at this year's Eigse exhibitions in St Patrick's College in Carlow. Henry is a young English sculptor, and he makes realistic, painted figures of working men - that is, manual workers. It's strange to see such workaday individuals, in boots, jeans and jackets, poised on plinths in casual poses like classical statuary. But there's also nothing novel about it. Americans such as George Segal, Ed Kienholz and Duane Hanson long ago displaced dignitaries and classical figures in favour of blue-collar folk. And Henry's work also accords with a current fashion for extremely realistic figurative sculpture.

Henry's focus, though, is very precise. His iconic working men have been interpreted as elegiac tributes to a vanishing notion of masculinity, making them distant relations of those socialist realist celebrations of heroic workers in Stalinist Russia or Mao's China. Certainly, on the limited evidence of the four works in Carlow, the masculine culture he has in mind relates to manual labour in an industrial society. But this passed in Thatcher's Britain, and Henry's figures are already a little like period pieces. Yesterday's manual worker is today's New Lad. Henry uses exaggeration in modelling faces, hands and feet, running the risk of drifting into caricature, and he is inclined to overwork the textural effects of fabric, but his work is certainly striking.

A huge, dark painting of waves on the open sea dominates the room of work by English painter Anthony Whishaw. It's a striking image, and its sheer expansiveness does little to prepare you for the fussiness of virtually everything else he exhibits. His odd, allegorical figures and murky interiors suggest the symbolism of Michael Ayrton, rendered in an overwrought style. Pauline Flynn gets a very substantial show to herself. Previously, a long spell living and working in Japan has been cited as significant in influencing her development, but there was little overt sign of this, which is probably a good thing. An indirect Japanese influence is evident here, though, chiefly in the best piece in her show, a quartet of carborundum prints on the theme of the four seasons. Spring, featuring delicate gold shoots against a deep green ground, is simply more subtle, more sensitive and less contrived than anything else she has included, but all four pieces, with their muted tones, are more successful than the paintings.

These are simple, usually geometrical compositions, their interlocking planes recalling, at a pinch, the forms of classical Japanese architecture. They aim high but don't quite make it. Countenance, with its broad yellow band, comes close, as do Condensed and Convergence. They're almost on to something, but fall short, lacking a sense of touch and, despite all the colour, they are curiously lifeless. There is some common ground between her work and that of Marie Hanlon, who shows a smaller group of paintings, more muted in colour and design, and more successful.

Rosmarie Arnet-Schonenberger, who has family connections with Carlow, shows a group of small, gestural paintings on paper, combining watercolour and gouache. They are drip and splash compositions, very free, and she does them extremely well. Each of them could easily degenerate into a complete mess, but doesn't, and each of them is a little world in itself. In their unabashed, celebratory use of colour they recall Sam Francis.

Lancashire-born Jean Macalpine takes meticulous photographs of sections of beautiful settings - the Grand Canyon, lushly vegetated valleys, a limestone quarry, the seashore - and hand tints the black-and-white prints. The resultant images are certainly beautiful, but they are beautiful because the locations are beautiful, and because Macalpine has an eye - and the requisite technical ability - to take good photographs. The tinting is subtle, but in the end doesn't really amount to anything more than an uneasy compromise between black-and-white and colour photography.

Darragh Hogan and Adam Bohanna are both young artists and their work shares a tone of slick irony. Bohanna, from Carlow, began by studying graphic design and there is a strong graphic element to his cool manipulation of motifs in works that also display a sophisticated grasp of tone and texture. Hogan's jokey, ironic paintings cover a lot of ground but look a little cursory in substance, almost as though they were rushed.

Catherine McCormack-Greene is a good sculptor who makes traditional, modestly scaled bronzes, and who manages, rather like Olivia Musgrave, to inject a certain narrative humour into her work without compromising its other qualities - no mean feat, because for some reason humour and bronze seem to be a problematic combination. In a different vein, the Japanese artist Naomi Seki, who has spent some time working in Ireland, shows a group of fine wood sculptures made chiefly with a chainsaw. The pieces, which refer to the way a tree trunk is processed into planks by a saw mill, recall the rough carpentered look of David Nash's work. At their best, they have a conceptual elegance and a rough, physical grace about them. Seki exploits the tension between our view of wood as an inert, functional material and its nature as something living.

Helen Gaynor's stylised compositions play cleverly with human and plant forms. They are crisply made, decorative paintings that balance the use of line and masses of colour effectively. Breda Flanagan's video installation of a supermarket trolley-ride is from her NCAD Degree show last year. A bitingly satirical piece on consumer culture, it deserved another spin around the aisles.

The Open Exhibition section was selected by painter Sharon O'Malley, who shows a series of richly textured pictures herself, strong works evoking the sudden, partial glimpse of a fish gliding silently by underwater. The Open Award winners are Brian Garvey, whose pale works include small, tasteful landscapes and one large, ambitious and only partially successful figure study, and Alan Crosby, whose rhythmic, landscape-based compositions look very promising. Also making a strong showing, in a variety of idioms, are Diarmuid Boyd, Stephen Cullen, Mike Fitzharris, Judy Hamilton, Patrick Viale, Geraldine Fox, Mark Pepper, Elizabeth O'Reilly and Patrick Griffin.

The Eigse Carlow Arts Festival 1999 Exhibitions are at St Patrick's College, Carlow until Sunday, June 20th