Paris hosts some unusual suspects

Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: The beautifully restored Collège des Irlandais in Paris, which reopened late last year as the Centre Culturel Irlandais, includes an exhibition space.

Reviewed

En Direct De Dublin, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, until August 14th (00-33-1-58521030)

Axel Boesten: Traffic Island, Gallery of Photography, Dublin, until August 14th (01-6714654)

Too often when a venue has a dauntingly varied cultural brief - this one's encompasses music, theatre, film, literature, history, the visual arts and more - the term is a euphemism for a foyer or some other indeterminate location. Such are the pressures on facilities that, throughout the planning stages, compromise begets compromise.

Presumably that was at least partly the case with the Irish Cultural Centre, but there are few signs of compromise in the way the 18th-century building has been carefully adapted to today's needs. And the visual arts have been accorded a substantial, versatile and workable gallery, with generous wall space, a sophisticated lighting system and a fine stone floor. It doubles as a projection room, but seamlessly so, and, it's worth noting, a great deal of visual-arts activity these days calls for large-scale projection facilities. There is also a large courtyard with clear potential as a venue.

Helen Carey, the centre's director, has been making some interesting visual-arts choices. A solo show by Felim Egan, earlier this year, may seem obvious enough. He is one of the most highly regarded artists in Ireland and one who has done well abroad. But Carey also invited Kevin Kavanagh, the Dublin gallery owner, to curate a show of work by artists from his stable, and the result, En Direct De Dublin, is a strong, accessible and well- received show of contemporary Irish art.

It is not strictly thematic, although all six artists deal with modes of representation, addressing how we see things, how vision is or might be structured. Kavanagh remarked that he thought of the work as generally concerned with urban living. So Michael Boran's photographs offer us fleeting, ghostly accounts of people's passage though public spaces. Gary Coyles's photographs feature night-time urban spaces that are ominous and off-limits.

Stephen Loughman's paintings consist of a pedantic, meticulous, Nicholson Barker-like description of a generic domestic space, imbued with an unease because we are invited to wonder what, if anything, might lurk behind all those doors and drawn curtains. In Paul Nugent's painting, an arrangement of pious statuary is all but immersed in coat upon coat of monochrome glazes. We keep trying to figure out what is going on and wonder just what content might consist of in this kind of painting.

Margaret Corcoran's paintings, from a series entitled An Enquiry, a reference to Edmund Burke, are indeed an inquiry, into modes of perception. A girl, rendered coolly and photographically, gazes at paintings that exemplify romanticism in the National Gallery of Ireland.

There is always something beyond the image in Mark O'Kelly's paintings. We are prompted to this conclusion in various ways, whether by an intimation that we are looking at an image of an image or, in the case of Audience, the implication that the viewers see their reflection rather than the ostensible subject.

One of the gratifying aspects of this show is that, although it is consistently strong, it is also relatively accessible for contemporary art. It is also out of the rut in that it showcases the work of artists each of whom has a distinctive, highly developed vision but none of whom is , so to speak, one of the usual suspects when it comes to official promotion abroad. Which makes the initiative all the more promising in terms of the cultural centre finding its voice. Apart altogether from other aspects of its role, the centre, reasonably resourced and programmed, has the potential to be a major resource for the Irish visual arts.

In Traffic Island, at the Gallery of Photography, the German photographer Axel Boesten offers an outsider's view of contemporary Ireland. That is, the Ireland of the late, great Celtic Tiger economy. Boesten travelled throughout the country during 2000 and 2001, photographing people and places. These images are presented in groups that make up a composite view of a changing country.

He is particularly alert to the impact of emblematic signs of modernity on the cultural and physical environment. He focuses, for example, on the proliferation of a modular, anonymous, functional architecture in business and technology "parks" and juxtaposes these new, rather inhuman spaces with archetypal scenes of natural expanses, apparently unspoilt, in Achill and elsewhere. He is trying neither to suggest that Achill is unspoilt nor to present a simplistic urban-rural, bad-good analysis.

In fact there is a sense, in several of the photographs of huge, blank natural spaces, that we are as estranged from them as from the brave new world of information technology and service industries.

Traditional beliefs endure, as indicated by pilgrims climbing Croagh Patrick and other references to ritual social activities. But Boesten has the knack, when he photographs people, of making them seem slightly apart from their setting, as though they do not quite belong. It is, in all, a subtle, thoughtful and visually rewarding exhibition and a good antidote to the endless parade of formulaic portraits of Ireland turned out for the tourist market.