Students after Saatchi

Reviewed: National College of Art and Design Fine Art Degree and Diploma exhibitions, NCAD, 100 Thomas Street, and the RHA Gallagher Gallery, until June 18th

Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology graduate exhibition, DLIADT, Kill Avenue, Dun Laoghaire, until June 16th

Dublin Institute of Technology Fine Art degree exhibition, St Joseph's, Portland Row, until June 15th

There is no Irish equivalent of Charles Saatchi, cruising the graduate shows, waiting to be amused, able with a nod of his head to change a penurious art student into a hot art world property. Yet in an odd way, Saatchi, and the Brit Art phenomenon for which he is in no small measure responsible, has upped the ante for graduating art students here as well as in Britain.

Nowadays, graduate students have to cope with unrealistic expectations of their final year work, nothing less than that it will emerge, butterfly-like from its institutional chrysalis, fully formed and artistically mature. To their credit, most students, as this year's shows in NCAD, DIT and DLIADT demonstrate, manage to give at least an impression of something along those lines, though often at great expense and huge effort.

The expense relates particularly to the technology that is more and more intrinsic to artistic process. Projects often entail individual sponsorship, and you will see sponsors credited throughout the NCAD catalogue. Frank Corry's need for sponsorship is clear. His central exhibit is a BMW meticulously upholstered from top to bottom in pinstripe fabric. Louis Copeland and BMW sportingly obliged.

As regards precociousness, one of David O'Mara's pieces demanded his adherence to a thousand-day schedule, that is, most of his time at college. Each day he picked up an image discarded on the streets. Documented and randomly displayed on five monitors simultaneously, they make a hypnotic index of city life.

It is reasonable that work will be derivative. The level of energy and inventiveness is still impressive in Dainne Nic Aoidh's elaborate Mathew Barney-like installation and Sophia Jacobsson-Malone's Kiki Smithlike figures. Less derivatively and more generally, Aoife Lalor's intricate installations, with their ingenious conflation of inner and outer worlds, suggest the influence of Dorothy Cross and Tony Oursler.

Similarly, Felim Egan and Antonio Tapies are perhaps influences on Gillian Lawler, but she has made some really outstanding paintings that are, in the end, very much her own.

Another startling painting talent at the NCAD is Bart O'Reilly, whose renderings of moving images, painted in the dark, displayed with fluorescent halos, have extraordinary surfaces, a curious, dreamlike quality, and a nicely oblique line of approach, occasionally reminiscent of the work of Mark Joyce.

There is a lot of committed, engaged painting at the Gallagher Gallery, including Imelda Healy's gutsy reworkings of Greek myth, Anne Quinn's atmospheric landscapes, Eoin Mac Lochlainn's intense colour studies and Laura Buckley's audacious sample-chart explorations of surface. Ciara Moore's video is an engaging meditation on time and memory in the Alain Resnais mould. Stephen Gunning is another promising video artist.

At a time when the idealism is said to have gone out of art, it's encouraging to report a few examples of art engage on the part of Natascha Fischell, Ann Ryan and Augustine O'Donoghue, whose cafe at Thomas Street is thoroughly interactive.

In Dun Laoghaire, there is a forensic quality to John Younge's photographs of derelict industrial interiors that correspond to photographer Gail McClurg's Stills from a Crime Scene, a sequence of beautifully made images which quietly suggest a hypothetical narrative of terrible violence. The metaphor of forensic examination recurs in the DLIADT fine art work, where Garret Power rather loosely assembles photographic evidence of an unspecified incident.

Claire Kerr, with great skill and flair, deconstructs the minutiae of Renaissance representation. Michelle Moore explores the distorted body-images that form part of eating disorders, while Fergal Fitzpatrick rather inconclusively juxtaposes inkblot testing and gestural markmaking.

Brigid Tiernan's images of clothes and accessories, described with extraordinary physicality, brilliantly encapsulate the creation and importance of a certain image. A composite grid of images of people staring intently off to one side (they are actually looking at television), by Liza Cauldwell, offers a slightly disquieting sidewards look at ourselves, in a similar way to Stephen Gunning's close-ups of faces in one of his videos at NCAD.

In a work memorable for an inventive, complex, composite family portrait, Stefanie Bergeon shows an autobiographical account of herself as an individual in a family network, aged five. In Juliet Kearney's extraordinary geometric patterns, the body or bodies that she uses as motifs disconcertingly disappear into the abstract designs she creates.

In the nascent field of interactive media, some projects are angled more towards fine art than design. Danielle Stephenson, for example, creates a memorable work based on the notion that every object "has a story to tell". She has issued an array of items with past owners, and of the owners' biographies. We can follow the trail by choosing the object. It is limited, but it is genuinely interactive, recalling the procedures of George Perec's Life: A User's Manual.Tamara Maria Wills imaginatively uses maps of the heavens and dance as metaphors for the cosmic dance.

At DIT there is a lot of textural, meaty work. Teresa O'Connor's terrifically free graphite drawings open up gritty expanses with great feeling for space. Printmaker Tom King also makes persuasive evocations of big, sweeping landscapes in bold, contrasting images. Denise Keane's landscapes are accomplished, rhythmically gestural compositions delivered with subtle colour sense. Orla Ruxton is more conventionally picturesque but also strong.

Moving from outside to in, Eileen Fagan's theatrical vignettes convincingly describe an enclosed world. Sinead Kirnan's paintings display good feeling for surface, and Tara Pratchayopak's intriguing, fragmentary plaster casts, taken from mannequins, are like jumbled fossils in limestone. After all that, Eithne Sweeney provides a welcome utopian vision with Embrace, urging us to take things easy. Saatchi probably wouldn't go for it. ET