Interventions on the landscape

Some considered curating meant a cracking visual-arts line-up at this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic.

Kilkenny Arts Festival has followed a curatorial model in programming for a few years now, and this year's visual-arts curator was Hugh Mulholland, who runs the Third Space Gallery in Belfast. With Kilkenny's rich complement of historical buildings and sites, he had hoped, he said, to make a number of "site sympathetic" interventions around the city. In the event, that was only possible to a limited extent, notably in the case of Bill Viola's Four Handsin St John's Priory in John Street and an understated three-person show in Butler House. There, Maud Cotter's up-ended tea cups, Antonio Riello's jet fighters and Cerith Wyn Evans's neon text interacted nicely with their august setting.

Meanwhile three large-scale video installations were assigned to the Cillín Hill Centre, a genuinely impressive venue, but one situated about a mile or so out on the Carlow Road and thus seriously handicapped by the city's decision to institute some medieval traffic-management restrictions during festival week, ensuring long tailbacks for anyone heading in that direction or back.

Apart from the curated strand of shows, there was a healthy crop of other events. Every year, for example, the Butler Gallery features a substantial exhibition that coincides with but stands apart from the festival. This year it's given over to Californian Barry Magee.

He is one of a relatively small number of artists who have made the leap from graffiti on the streets (under the tag Twist) to exhibitions in museums, and his Butler Gallery show, which is more than worth seeing and runs until October 21st, demonstrates that what he does is to bring the energy of the street into the museum. It's something that's difficult to manage because it's immediately as if you put quotation marks around the pieces, as though they've been snatched from their usual habitat and landed like fish, but it works here.

McGee's ramshackle, composite pieces have tremendous verve and energy. He pits order against chaos with the two basic elements of his language: hard-edged latticework grids, brightly coloured and, hung together, clashing like mad, and his "wall pimples", scrappy assemblages bulging out from the walls. To which are added graffiti flourishes, photographs, drawings and carvings of comic book-like characters and video monitors. But nothing in his show clearly begins or ends, the whole point is that it maintains an ongoing, rambling momentum that brings you along with it.

In a way, the same could be said of the ceramic artist John ffrench, whose retrospective, A Life in Colour, is installed across the road from the castle in the National Craft Gallery (it too extends well beyond the festival, until October 7th). Meticulously curated by Peter Lamb, the show comprehensively charts ffrench's evolution as an artist from 1951 onwards. He was instinctively drawn towards a free, expressive idiom in ceramics, and this liberating, upbeat impulse comes through strongly in his work, lending it considerable appeal, visually and philosophically.

Picasso must rank as a dominant influence, whose example in some way licensed ffrench's playful treatment of form and line. He has great flair for positively singing colours. Not everything works. Some of his ceramic assemblages are just too sugary for their own good, for example. But then even Picasso produced a lot of dross and in the end there are many superb pieces in the show, more than enough to confirm ffrench's considerable reputation in the long term and, significantly, you get the feeling that he is a man who loves working, who believes that industry and inventiveness are essential to the enjoyment of life.

As part of Callan 800, a celebration of the town's founding, Butler Gallery director Anna O'Sullivan selected a fine show for the KCAT Art and Study Centre. Tony O'Malley and Jane O'Malley - A Unionpaid tribute to one of the town's most illustrious artistic sons but also to the extraordinarily central role Jane played in his life and work, while also managing to pursue her own work as an artist. During their time together, work and life clearly ranked as one for both of them. To an exceptional degree, Tony's art is a kind of visual diary, a record of time passing and times prized, which lent an added poignancy to the exhibition, it must be said.

O'Sullivan's choice, which concentrated on Tony's earlier work, was extremely thoughtful and quietly provided a mass of biographical material in Tony's views of Callan and environs, and portraits of members of his immediate family. Jane's elegant paintings formed an ideal counterpart and took up the story with accounts of a shared and cherished history. The show was extremely popular locally and further afield. Just along the road in Callan, Endangered Open Studios showcased the work of seven locally based artists, Steven Aylin, Helen Comerford, Jean Conroy, Richard Coghlan, Etaoin Holahan, Patrick O'Connor and Alan Raggett. Occupying what was the workhouse, all are engaged in industrious and impressive practices.

Turning to the festival's curated strand, Danish artist Jesper Just (initially seen in Ireland as part of EV+A 2007) makes short, usually musical and usually cryptic films with lavish, operatic production values. To date, they predominantly explore masculinity in terms of relationships between men. In the very brief No Man is an Island IIa young man (Just's favourite lead, Johannes Lilleore, who has a remarkably expressive face) in what looks like a pole-dancing club, occupied by several solitary male clients, spontaneously bursts into a rendition of Roy Orbison's Crying. Others join in, tears roll down his cheeks. So far, one would have to say, so corny. At the same time, it's an affecting and interesting work. The absence of women is noticeable. They are present only in the form of a painting in the background and a poster or two, and perhaps Just is making the point that women are, in fact, absent presences in such clubs. He zeroes in on the emotional isolation of the men and sees their impassive masculinity as a facade expressive of weakness. Hence the way the young man's sincerity melts their hearts. Well, yes, it's still corny, but it's a lot more as well.

Just's was the most striking of the three works at Cillín Hill, but Mark Orange's Rise and Fall, a sardonic look at changing US attitudes to immigration and otherness, was concise and effective and Amar Kanwar's intense, densely atmospheric poetic meditation on contemporary India was engrossing though, at feature-film length, required a serious commitment of time.

Bill Viola's installations tend to polarise opinion, largely because of his efforts to rehabilitate a sense of the sacred in art, often situated in proximity to religious contexts, though related more to individual spiritual experience than doctrine. Four Handsfeatured four pairs of hands, making a series of ordinary, daily gestures, relayed on four small monitors, against the background of the church interior. The mute choreography was oddly soothing and compelling. Hugh Mulholland did well in highlighting the work of an underrated artist, painter Marie Hanlon, at Castlecomer Discovery Park. Hanlon's elegant abstractions, once strictly geometric, have evolved to encompass casual loops slowly unfurling across their expansive spaces.

FACTOTUM'S DOCUMENTARY exhibition, supposedly charting the history of an apocryphal "experimental local choir" with a radical political and aesthetic agenda, was suitably sited in the festival box office in St Francis Abbey Brewery. Out at the Grennan Mill Craft School in Thomastown, a spare display of Eithne Jordan's small-scale "monumental still lifes" looked terrific. They are monumental by virtue of the fact that the human presence is dwarfed by the scale of urban spaces and buildings. She shared the mill with Peter Wenger, whose batiks take on a range of pictorial ambitions very capably. His evocation of a starlit sky brilliantly exploited the deep dark tones made possible by the medium.

The County Council's Gallery at No 72 John Street features (until August 31st) a particularly strong show by three artists whose diverse endeavours are united by a preoccupation with the near disappearance of the elm tree. Saturio Alonso, Alan Counihan and Derek Whitticase bring distinctive sensibilities to bear in works using elm wood and other materials. The National Craft Gallery's The Light Fantastic(running until September 30th) is an eye-opening survey of contemporary stained glass, featuring such established glass artists as Killian Schurmann and Debbie Dawson.

Mark Garry curated this year's Sculpture at Kells, which features quirky "interventions" in the stunning priory site by six artists. Outstanding were Nina McGowan and David Beattie. The former's monumental sci-fi spacecraft and the latter's Lego "shadows" inserted between trees and wall had a winning element of incongruity and surprise. Nothing was uninteresting, though fewer of Karl Burke's ubiquitous two-by-four planks leaning against walls would surely have been more effective. Overall, Kilkenny's mix of curator plus others has paid dividends.