For many years, annual open submission shows, including the Living Art, the Independent Artists and several others, played a vital role in the development of contemporary Irish art. Less so now. Many of them have lapsed, writes Aidan Dunne

Reviewed
The Happiest Country in the World, The Atrium, Office of Public Works, St Stephen's Green, Dublin, until tomorrow

Many Silver Things, Nigel Rolfe, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, until July 30, 01-6713414

Uncertain Ground, Philippa Sutherland, Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until July 29, 01-6612558

New Prints, Lemonstreet Gallery, Dublin, until Friday, 01-6710244

The RHA, which once looked like the most irrelevant, is the exception in having convincingly reinvented itself. Having said which, it's good to see this year's Oireachtas Exhibition, at the OPW headquarters on St Stephen's Green, invested with new energy and coherence.

As it happens, it is not the result of open submission. Rather, two curators, Ruairí Ó Cuiv and Clíodhna Shaffrey, were enlisted and have built a very good show around the idea of artists who explore "everyday life in Ireland". Hence the title The Happiest Country in the World, drawn from the Economist's survey of life satisfaction, which placed us out in front in the quality-of-life stakes. It also, as it happens, has echoes of an idealised view of de Valera's Ireland.

The first thing you encounter in the show, though, is a record of the collapse of the Utopian dream of urban planning that was Ballymun. A video by Eamonn Elliott, Una Farrelly and Cian Harte straightforwardly documents the demise of the Pearse and McDermott towers, one nibbled away piecemeal by a raptor-like machine, the other collapsing in a cloud of dust. Yet Ballymun is also the focus of a huge regeneration project, so that what might seem a failure of sorts is rather more ambiguous, allowing room for real optimism.

What's particularly good about the show, though, is the diversity of engagement with aspects of contemporary Ireland that it offers. Every artist included adopts an implicitly or explicitly critical stance in relation to familiar realities, from Augustine O'Donoghue's documentation of protest and debate on several current issues to Amy O'Riordan's brash celebration of empowered young women. The sense of modernity as an immensely complex, multi-layered, heterogeneous space drives Mark McGreevy's work (though it is a pity that only small-scale pieces and not some of his outstanding large paintings are included). Most of the pieces included have been exhibited elsewhere, but they are usefully combined in this context. Unfortunately, the show had an extremely short run in Dublin, but it will travel on to other venues. Keep an eye out for it.

Nigel Rolfe's Many Silver Things at the Green on Red Gallery does what it says on the tin. It features items from a collection of silver, or at any rate metallic, silver-coloured objects of a practical nature, photographed in a studio setting and printed large in colour or black-and-white. In the title sequence of 12 still-life studies, each item - including a grater, a garden fork, a scoop - is depicted close up in splendid isolation, though elsewhere the objects are shown in juxtaposition with bodies, though not necessarily putting them to their intended uses.

A galvanised bucket, for example, is plonked squarely over someone's (Rolfe's?) head. Two video pieces extend this idea, strikingly merging the silver things, in one case an electric fan, with a head, and incorporating the things themselves as part of the installation. The electric fan is a sleek, glossy product, but for the most part the other objects we see are more obviously handmade, rougher, fashioned with minimal technological resources, part of what Rolfe terms an "archaeology of the domestic". That is, not for the first time in his work, he is drawing attention not just to things but to the way they stem from and exemplify the nature of our relationship to the world around us. There is an elegiac quality to many of the images, because of the gravity of the way they are composed and presented but also because the objects they lovingly depict seem to belong to the past. Considerably magnified, their surfaces are textured and worked so that they have a strangely lifelike quality. In fact, Rolfe refers to galvanised steel as being like an organic body covered with a protective skin. While the utilitarian objects are in a sense rudimentary, they are not at all crude or ugly. On the contrary, they are beautiful practical designs that have evolved over long periods of time with regard to available skills and materials and function.

It is as if the colour has been bleached out of the images in Philippa Sutherland's Uncertain Ground, at the Ashford Gallery. Her cool, understated paintings offer us fragmented views of figures and landscapes, urban and rural. In the way they are composed and cropped they recall photography and, even more, film. By providing us with a limited amount of information she suggests open-ended narratives, and occasionally links disparate images together as if to underline the possibility.

The figures in her paintings are usually young and minimally described in an Alex-Katz-meets-Luc-Tuymans kind of way. Often it is as if the landscape settings inform the emotional states of these outline characters. Economically rendered accounts of frozen terrain, for example, might imply correspondingly chilly feelings. An effective dramatic framework is constructed in such indirect, laconic terms. We get a surprisingly strong sense of inner life, and complex shades of meaning are conveyed in disarmingly oblique ways. A glance over the shoulder in I know where I'm going immediately suggests that, as in the Powell-Pressberger film of the same title, that the subject does not know what she wants or where she is going.

Sutherland has a sure grasp of her pictorial language in terms of both content and technique. While they are indeed understated, her restraint is admirable. She knows when to stop, when to hold back, where others would over- elaborate. The paintings are well-made in a pared-down manner, with close tonal values and muted, limited colour. Often the pigment is glossy and oily. Rendered with casual, deadpan skill, the surfaces of the work are self-effacing and unshowy, but quietly beautiful. While the pictures work extremely well collectively there are, individually, many gems, including Disappear and Thaw, and they are extraordinarily good value.

The Lemonstreet Gallery is currently showcasing new printworks by five leading artists. These include Barrie Cooke, whose underwater Striper is a wonderful image. The other artists are Felim Egan, Anne Madden, Patrick Scott and Charles Tyrrell, whose huge grid-based woodblock prints are formidable but surely problematic in brown frames.