Postmodern spin on political satire

Visual Art/Aidan Dunne: Reviewed: Once it was a lie, now it's the truth . . ., David Godbold, Kerlin Gallery until February 12th (01-6709093).

New York Paintings, Brian Gormley, Hillsboro Fine Art until February 15th (01-6777905).

Dark Light, Michael Flaherty, Hallward Gallery until February 17th (01-6621482).

Sun City, Peter Granser, Belfast Exposed Photography until February 25th 048-90230965).

One can see why David Godbold's quick-witted graphic juxtapositions of high and low culture, image and text, weighty thoughts and ephemeral trivia have helped to win him a prestigious commission. As an official election artist he will have unprecedented access to the inner workings of the next British general election campaign, widely anticipated to take place next May.

His current exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery, Once it was a lie, now it's the truth . . . could be seen as giving a post-modern spin to the art of political satirists such as William Hogarth or Thomas Rowlandson. It's predominantly graphic, irreverent, and multi-layered.

The 200-plus works in the show grew out of a mode of practice that he developed over a period of years, one that really crystallised during a PS 1 residency in New York.

The basic recipe entails his making fragmentary copies or pastiches of old master drawings (though the sources can on occasion be cartoons or other images) on tracing paper laid over found pieces of paper. The found papers might be fliers, or hand-written items from notice boards, or people's discarded notes or doodles.

The odd counterpoint of the two divergent layers is augmented by another element in the form of captions and annotations, printed or hand-written, which are applied to the drawings.

These textual additions are much more than afterthoughts.

In fact, scabrous, facetious, sarcastic and vulgar as they usually are, they set the tone of the work, subverting the notionally coherent moral universe evoked in much of the quoted imagery, a great deal of which is religious. There is a sense of the layered nature of modernity, of information overload, of competing narratives uneasily co-existing but never integrating.

Godbold's frenetically referential snippets of text, quoted or his own, continually scorn the official line, any official line.

Overall though, his point is not to argue for the dissociative nature of reality or for a blanket denial of meaning. He doesn't, say, propose an unbridgeable gap between signifier and signified.

Rather his texts are irascible but comprehensible critical responses to invidious circumstances, to a world of false promises. There is a lot of text in the work as a whole, so much so that one feels there is a compulsive quality to his chains of addenda as though he can't help himself. As though he is fired with the bitterness of one betrayed by those who pretend to authority, moral or otherwise.

The underlying notes and images, muted by the tracing paper, are like the background chatter and buzz of urban life. The foreground narratives, meanwhile, have the character of myths, including the myths of history, a favourite Godbold target.

Carried on random currents, hedged by doubts and disclaimers, the images can never retain the authoritative status they once claimed. In that sense, the show's title could be reversed to read: Once it was the truth, now it's a lie . . .

The show is strikingly installed, with two formidable clusters of works, one framed, the other, smaller cluster unframed.

The end wall of the gallery is painted green and more formally hung with another set of drawings, in imitation of a gentleman's picture gallery. In addition, there is an accompanying publication, generously illustrated, with critical essays.

Like stained glass, Brian Gormley's New York Paintings at Hillsboro Fine Art feature islands of coloured light set against a dark grid. In his case the grid is a coat of heavy, enveloping black that threatens to block out the light completely.

Given the New York context and the subtitle Out of the Blue and into the Black, it's hard not to see the work in relation to 9/11, and there are a few more explicit references that reinforce the connection.

The black might be seen as either (or for that matter both) a sea of ash or a mental darkness, threatening to stifle the underlying jazzy vitality, the exuberant play of line and colour.

Actually the threat is perhaps carried out a bit too severely in several works. The bursts of bright colour, criss-crossed by frenetically busy lines recall the spiky, calligraphic style of the short-lived Jean-Michel Basquiat, graffiti artist turned art world star.

Michael Flaherty's Dark Light at the Hallward Gallery is appropriately titled given that it marks a decisive move away from the bold colours he has previously favoured. His new work is more muted and more tonal generally, though he still relishes strong contrasts, with splashes of vivid yellow, for example. He is a landscape painter, and he concentrates on the landscape around him, that is the Cloghane-Brandon area under Mount Brandon and including the valley of the Abhainn Mhor River.

What seems to have happened is that his growing knowledge and appreciation of this terrain have deepened his sense of engagement not with place per se but with the structure of the landscape. Where the earlier, more colourful paintings were about surface, now there is a sense of layered process, of great stretches of time and slow change.

Austrian photographer Peter Granser's Sun City at Belfast Exposed Photography documents life in America's first seniors-only community, in Arizona.

It's a fantastically bland place, tamed and suburbanised to a parodic degree, bearing no relationship to its actual setting, existing as an idealised social space. Its denizens lead lives devoted to leisure, lounging in the pool, dressing up to take part in pageants, oddly infantalised.

Granser's award-winning images look almost painfully bleached by sunlight. He dwells on kitsch details such as ornamental animals, cloyingly sweet décor. Huge cacti erupt from the ground, rude reminders of the world beyond the irrigated lawns.

That world beyond is also visible in a view of the town firing range, a row of targets peppered with bullet holes, beyond which the arid landscape stretches away to the remote distance.