Something for everyone at Eigse

Vsual Arts: Reviewed - Éigse Carlow Arts Festival 2005 Exhibitions, St Patrick's College and the Presentation Convent, College Street, and the Institute of Technology, Carlow, Kilkenny Road. Daily 11am-7pm until June 19 (059-9140491)

Sean Henry makes bloke-ish sculptures of, mostly, blokes. His figures are ordinary people, casually attired in anonymous, everyday apparel - jeans and trainers, business suits, unironed shirts - and are fashioned in clay and either fired or cast in bronze and, in both cases, painted. They are very well painted, so that there is a disconcerting realism to them. They are more real, in fact, than many cast-from-life sculptures, even though Henry, rather cleverly, avoids life scale. His subjects are either very small or larger than life.

He was born in England in 1965 and is based in London. Éigse picked up on him relatively early on. Some pieces exhibited as part of Éigse 98 were extremely popular with visitors. You can see why. The sculptures grab your attention, make you look again and again. At first you might be engaged by their compelling verisimilitude and details of their making but, once drawn in, you begin to notice other qualities.

Generally speaking, his characters are pensive and preoccupied. It is as if they have been captured in moments of doubt or reflection or self-realisation. Often they can be in a trance-like state, completely absorbed in their own thoughts. This accounts significantly for the strength of the work.

Henry convinces us in terms of visual appearance but simultaneously conveys a profound sense of inner life. The possibility of Carlow IT acquiring a piece has been mentioned. To judge by the sculpture currently occupying the courtyard there, it would be a really good move.

Henry is certainly one of the highlights of this year's Éigse. As ever, the festival offers a concentrated dose of visual art across three venues. In the best possible sense, that strategy is a way of being all things to all people. No one is going to like everything but, gosh, such is the sheer density and variety of work on display that you are sure to find something you do like.

Over the past couple of years, the disused chapel of the Presentation Convent on College Street has come to be a very useful venue. The two-storey building is tremendously atmospheric and the upper floor space boasts a huge, incredibly elaborate, improbably ornate wooden pulpit. Scots-born, Finnish-based Charles Sandison's Good and Evil is perfectly sited in this chapel space. A video projection underpinned by an intricate grid structure, it features the flowing, kinetic interplay of two modular elements, coloured red and white. The interaction between the two is the result of a computer programme devised to mimic evolutionary processes as organisms proliferate, compete and adapt. Here, in this venue, it echoes the clear patterning of stained glass.

The best space in St Patrick's College, an airy first floor room, is given over to the paintings of John Noel Smith. To a group of his United Field Paintings, in fact. Smith's paintings are abstract but, even for those wary of abstraction, approachable by virtue of the fact that they are fairly luscious objects, richly coloured and thickly textured. Smith relishes the physical properties of oil paint, which has to be one of the most gorgeous substances devised by humans.

He brings us back to a realisation of its exceptional nature: disparate physical materials are harnessed for certain characteristics and qualities and incorporated in a remarkably consistent, unitary scheme with an almost alchemical element of transformation. A successful painting is, you could say, a united field.

It could well be that Smith alludes to the condition of paintings by evoking the efforts of theoretical physicists to frame a unified field theory, a theory that will accommodate the four known fundamental natural forces. But the metaphor has a wide application in his work, referring as well, for example, to the difficulties that prevent the unification of Ireland's four "fields". The paintings function on these multiple levels of reference while also aiming to work as engaging formal structures.

St Patrick's features a number of visitors and Irish artists. Of the former, the French sculptor Dominique Piveteaud steals the show with her small, understated constructions built from zinc roofing material. Arranged in roughly symmetrical concentric folds in small panels, the zinc turns out to be a surprisingly expressive medium. Piveteaud refers to the pieces as "walls, windows or doors", which is accurate enough in that they all seem to imply an intriguing something beyond, an imaginative space.

Less convincing, perhaps, are painters Alex Calinescu and Vanda Harvey. The latter explicitly sets out to generate imaginative spaces by using the schematic language of map-making as a basis for her paintings. Yet there is something under-powered about her work in terms of its scale and colour. Despite her use of vivid, high-octane colours and bold patterning, the results lack energy and spontaneity.

Where Calinescu is in a way all about spontaneity, making terse, linear compositions, one is not entirely sure that her gestures carry the authority, the Zen-like sureness that they require.

Another visitor, Marzia Colonna is an Anglo-Italian sculptor in the classical 20th century European tradition. This means that there is a deja vu quality to her capably conceived and made stylised figurative and symbolic work.

Michael Canning's paintings, centred on botanically exact studies of plants encountered and garnered during walks, are about not only looking but also seeing: the perceptual frameworks that we automatically employ in dealing with the world, sorting things into contexts and levels. An underlying melancholy comes through his beautifully made paintings. There is melancholy to Paddy McCann's paintings, as well. Feelings associated with an awareness of transience, fragility and loss are expressed by means of a spare iconography in works built up in slow, gentle, incremental layers.

Slow surfaces and muted tonality characterise Tadhg McSweeney's accomplished paintings about time and the workings of memory. In what amounts to thematic consistency, Sharon Kelly's outstanding, sensitive work also addresses these areas of concern, while Padraig Cunningham's glowing canvases have a mystical, visionary intensity, evoking transcendent experience.

Platform 059 is a showcase for younger artists from Carlow, where Niall de Buitléar (arbitrary systems of mark-making delivered with wit), Ann Marie Hayes (Rebecca Horn-like extensions of self into the environment), and Paul Coffey (surreal interventions) and Ciaran Walsh (utopian architectural planning and the rapture of theory) all acquit themselves very well.

Daphne Wright's video, a floor-level view of cows in a milking parlour, is a powerful piece of work. Tim Goulding has selected this year's open submission show, which is a good, even-tempered display. He gave the award to Miriam D Robinson for an ethereally pale oil.

Next year sees a major new departure for Éigse with the appointment of Cliodhna Shaffrey as curator of the visual art programme. This week should also see confirmation of the design for Visualise, the long-anticipated, major new visual arts centre to be built on a prime site in the grounds of St Patrick's College.