VisualArts:Aidan Dunne reviews I want to believe, Martin Healy, and Shadowtime, Stefan Kürtenat the RHA Gallagher Gallaries and Establishing a Mission, Vanessa Donoso Lópezat the Ashford Gallery, RHA.

I want to believe, Martin Healy, and Shadowtime, Stefan Kürten.Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Galleries I, II & III, 15 Ely Place Tues- Sat 11am-5pm, Thurs 11am-8pm, Sun 2pm-5pm Until Aug 26 01-6617286

Establishing a Mission, Vanessa Donoso López.Ashford Gallery, RHA Until Aug 1

For several years now, Martin Healy has been making work that explores our fascination with the demonic and the uncanny in the everyday. That is, the way a social surface of apparent contentment, order and affluence is underpinned by something threatening and, in conventional terms, inexplicable. It's not a novel idea and nor is it presented as such. Goya's celebrated etching The Sleep of Reason Gives Birth to Monstersis a classic example. Horror movies in which privileged teenagers are pursued by psychotic or supernatural killers are another. In several projects made in the ÜS, Healy alluded to comparable films, notably The Amityville Horror, with a series of eerie photographs of the rural suburb alleged to be the site of a famous haunting.

Some are included in his RHA Gallagher Gallery show, I want to believe, and they are terrifically atmospheric and creepy. Significantly, though, there is nothing overtly creepy about them. He leaves it up to us to infer the images' ominous import, as with the photographs of a conifer plantation that comprise Wald. Given the strong relationship between much of what interests him and popular films, it seems logical that he has worked a lot with video, and two installations are included.

Genesis 28:12 features a band playing Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. The biblical reference is to Jacob's ladder, the stairway itself, and Healy explores the urban myth that the lyrics of the song feature encoded demonic messages that are revealed if a recording is played backwards. There is something abstract about the performance as filmed and installed by Healy. We are put in the position of the audience, but we occupy the cavernous space of the main Gallagher Gallery which feels a bit empty and, appropriately, strange.

The other video piece, Skywatch, consists of an interview with an apparently normal sort of bloke who saw and tried to photograph a UFO at Warminster in England, only to find that the mysterious object failed to register on the film. Again, Healey's presentation is clever. The interview is projected on two screens at right angles, so we are immediately distanced, put into a position of evaluation rather than involvement. As with Genesis 28:12we are not allowed to be simply an audience. At the same time, Healy is deliberately absent himself, in terms of editorial role. He's saying nothing, either way.

Many urban myths have been demolished by the evidence, but of course that is neither here nor there as far as those who subscribe to them are concerned. As the artist puts it, they want to believe because, as Maeve Connolly argues in her catalogue essay, myths are about the construction of meaning. The myth takes the place of something that is missing in people's lives, and alleviates their underlying fear of a lack of meaning. One of the series of photographs related to the Skywatchvideo documents some worn graffiti at Warminster, which was actually the site of a rash of UFO sightings in the 1960s, saying simply: "We are not alone."

Healy's work is extremely approachable and is open to several levels of interpretation. When viewed en masse, in terms of pieces not included in this exhibition (those related to childhood, for example), it tends to increase in richness and texture. Intriguingly, there are several striking photographs of a hawk in the show that stand somewhat apart from everything else, while being atmospherically consistent. Taken in all, the exhibition is brilliantly installed in the main gallery, always a difficult space.

IT'S WELL COMPLEMENTED by Stefan Kürten's Shadowtimein Galleries II and III, and by Vanessa Donoso López's Establishing a Missionin the Ashford Gallery. Both explore aspects of domesticity with an edge to them. Kürten is a musician as well as a painter and his use of pattern in his pictures has clear musical parallels. He uses repeat patterns from wallpaper or carpets, the kind of patterns inspired by oriental rugs, but even apart from these formal patterns, the surfaces of his paintings are extraordinary in the way they are densely and evenly worked. As he notes himself, he tries to give the same level of emphasis to every piece of surface, so that the overall compositions are in a sense rug-like, as though they are woven rather than painted.

He uses pigment in thin glazes over grounds of gold or silver, giving his works an ethereal, shimmering light. The images are derived from views of mostly suburban interiors and exteriors. They are modestly utopian spaces and Kürten doesn't set out to disparage them or the aspirations that shaped them. Rather, because of his treatment, they have an hallucinatory or dreamlike quality, not a million miles removed from Peter Doig's work. Time and again he evokes the idea of a constructed, idealized environment.

All in the garden is not quite rosy, however. While several works are infused with mellowness, others are more ambiguous in mood.

The relentless layering of patterns becomes too much, engendering a feeling of claustrophobia. In practice, that is often what has happened in suburbia as in other utopian environments. What should be idyllic becomes intolerable and one has to flee, particularly if, say, we are talking about a growing generation living their parents' dreams.

Yet the overall tone is positive. We don't see people in the works at all, just places designed for habitation or other utilitarian purposes - a school, a garden centre. The artificiality of the environment, at times carried to extreme levels of exotic ornamentation, is more celebrated than derided. In the end Kürten has produced something like a typological project, encouraging us to look anew at places we might otherwise dismiss as simply banal or even objectionable.

LÓPEZ'S SHOW WORKS as an integral installation, resembling an overwrought parlour, though it is composed of myriad individual pieces. There is a manic, obsessive character to the way she marshals enormous numbers of toys and ornaments and animates them with, mostly, electrical clock works. She has in mind the childhood fascination with wind-up toys in the pre-video game age, and she does convey the idea of magical imaginative invention, as opposed to computer-generated effects.