Raedecker very much in fashion

Visual Arts: Michael Raedecker was born in Amsterdam in 1963. He studied fashion design and then painting before going on to complete an MA at Goldsmiths College in London, the cradle of the Young British Artists, the YBAs. He's been based in London ever since, and has done well there: he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2000 and won the John Moores Prize in Liverpool the previous year, for example, writes Aidan Dunne

Reviewed

-show, Michael Raedecker, Douglas Hyde Gallery until Nov 23 01-6081116

Adrienne Symes, Celbridge Community Library

RHA Drawing Exhibition, Ashford Gallery until Nov 23 01-6617286

Although he is a few years older than Damien Hirst, he arrived at Goldsmiths relatively late in the day, when he was well into his 30s. And his work did not exactly fit the sensationalist YBA bill. It was, and still is, based on painting, relatively low-key and labour intensive. And the labour is usually the artist's own, rather than that of technicians or assistants.

His idiosyncratically titled exhibition -show, at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, marks a significant development in his work in that he tackles the genre of still life, though it is thoroughly in keeping with everything he's previously done. It could be that two consistent facets of his method stem from his experience of fashion design. One is his distinctive use of thread and sewing, another is the designer's habit of trawling through masses of catalogues and other material for ideas. The paintings that established Raedecker's reputation were inspired in part by old domestic building brochures and magazines.

He devised a characteristic nowhere landscape, a Spartan, edge of desert terrain with suburban trappings and a slightly desolate, melancholy feel to it. His images were and are achieved with ingenious illusionistic effects combining the use of thread and paint. This may sound odd, and it is odd, but he clearly loves playing along the fault line between reality and illusion: he often emphasises the flatness of the picture surface by laying on big thick blobs of pigment, for example, just in case we get too comfortable in a represented world.

People are a notable absence in his pictures of habitations, though he has made and continues to make iconic portrait images. Also striking is the sparseness of his compositions. His paintings are mostly empty space, dusty expanses interrupted by bits of grit and tangled threads and other incidental detritus. This combination of emptiness and residue surely accounts for the air of desolation, and it is there in his still lifes, which sometimes take the form of bedraggled garlands skirting a central emptiness.

In the European tradition, and particularly in that part of Europe where Raedecker comes from, paintings of brilliant floral displays symbolise the brevity and transience of life and the inevitability of death. Raedecker's hybrid works take this symbolism one stage further. Rather than emphasising the abundance and vitality of the blooms, he aims for an air of shabbiness and decay. Fading and dissolution are implicit in the dreams of life and beauty. There is a certain liveliness in the virtuosity of his embroidered flowering plants but, whereas embroidery traditionally features evenness of pattern and form, an optimum perfection, Raedecker unmistakably suggests something much more dystopian and downbeat. The inclusion of a couple of portrait images of Hitler, blandly presented, adds to the mood of simmering unease.

Adrienne Symes is one of a number of Irish painters who work in an area that derives from 19th-century realism and the French plein air tradition. That is, it privileges fidelity to the world of appearances and favours a straightforward, descriptive style of depiction, with an awareness of the nuts and bolts of picture-making in terms of composition, colour, tone and form. There is a timeless quality to such painting, which seems endlessly capable of helping to make sense of the world around us.

Over the last few years Symes, who is clearly fascinated by water, has explored several rivers and canals in series of paintings. Water featured prominently in her recent show at Celbridge Community Library (her work can also be seen in the forthcoming Christmas exhibition at Jorgensen Fine Art). As well as studies of rivers, lakes and reservoirs, she had coastal views from East and West.

There is always a tremendous quality of engagement in her work, a lively excitement that has to do with the problems encountered in codifying the bewildering complexity of the physical world into a stringently organised pictorial language, limited in terms of palette and tone. Symes is admirably spare and understated in her approach and again and again one is made aware that her pictures arise from subtle and prolonged observation of their subjects.

The RHA Drawing Exhibition imposed its own limitations on the academicians invited to submit works for inclusion. They could make a drawing on an A1 or A2 sheet. The net was cast wide, encompassing academicians, associates and honorary academicians. At the Ashford Gallery, we see works by 38 of them. The mechanism of selection is not specified. It is a fascinating and enjoyable show, but it is also patchy, which makes one wonder about the work we don't see.

Everyone can draw in some sense and most people do draw. This show, though, is not designed to explore the parameters of what drawing is or might be, or how we habitually employ drawing in myriad ways. It's more about the idea of the well-made drawing. That has to do with ability and proficiency but also, surely, with vitality, which can manifest itself as an edgy something extra. David Crone's Seed Bank is a case in point, a tremendously lively, involving study of a row of plant forms.

Donald Teskey's charcoal view of a wave breaking against rock, admittedly a subject that has preoccupied him almost exclusively over the past couple of years, is also outstanding, a tremendously forceful piece of work. Raymond Piper's frenetically busy, crowded, omnivorous piece of description, Cranmore Templeton's House is terrific. If you want crisp efficacy it's there in the work of Campbell Bruce, Michael O'Dea, George Potter, Gary Coyle, Liam Belton and John Long.

Barbara Warren's patiently observed interior is exemplary and both Melanie le Brocquy and Anita Shelbourne impart a real sense of living presence to their respective figure subjects. Obsessiveness comes through in Michael Quane and Carey Clarke's carefully burnished pieces.