There is a giddy, kinetic quality to the work in William Kentridge's exhibition, Tide Table, at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery. Of course, given that he makes animated films, that's hardly surprising, writes Aidan Dunne

But it's not just that the images move. There is a feeling that at their very heart they are edgy and unstable, fundamentally uncertain. Kentridge himself, when he appears in his own films, reflects this restlessness, as if he relishes the uncertainty, the sheer intellectual discomfort, involved in the business of creation

He is South African, based in Johannesburg, and he first registered on the international art scene in a major way in 1997. Since then he has maintained a prodigious working pace and has exhibited extensively all over the world. The Model and Niland show was initiated by Suzanne Woods during her time as director there, and it was organised in co-operation with the RHA and the Limerick City Gallery, a welcome collaboration which means that many more people will see it when it travels on to those venues. And Kentridge's work is well worth seeing.

Drawing is the essence of what he does, but not drawing as it is conventionally understood, in terms of images that one might frame and hang on the wall. While he does produce such images, they are, despite their undoubted merits, peripheral to the role they play in his stop-frame animations. He'll make an drawing, photograph it, partly erase it, draw the sequential detail to the erased portion on the same sheet of paper, photograph that, and so on, leaving a series of ghostly impressions, a charcoal vapour trail. Effectively he is destroying as well as creating drawings as he progresses. He also mixes live action with drawn images, appearing himself, a cross between a magician and a hapless, Chaplinesque figure adrift in a world full of pitfalls.

In fact, born in 1955, he has extensive experience in fields beyond fine art per se prior to 1997, having studied politics, then mime (in Paris) and having worked in theatre in several capacities, including as actor, writer, designer and director. He has also worked with the Handspring Puppet Company.

His studio plays an integral role in several of the films in the show. Here he cites the influence of Bruce Nauman's early video works. They were made in the artist's studio and feature the artist engaged in simple, repetitive actions. There is the sense in them of Nauman going back to the drawing board, discovering a novel, basic artistic alphabet, a new way to approach the world, through the medium of video. Similarly, Kentridge delights in the magical effects made possible by simple animation.

It is clear that, for him, having lived through the end of apartheid in South Africa and its complex social and political aftermath, the studio is anything but an ivory tower, and the artist is never remote from day-to-day reality. He is what might be described as a troubled observer rather than a full participant.

The exhibition's title piece is a dreamlike, ambiguous meditation on the state of things in South Africa. The film features a fictional protagonist who recurs in his work, Soho Eckstein, a property developer who is emblematic of the privileged, entrepreneurial class that flourished under apartheid, a system grotesquely skewed to the advantage of a white elite.

Here, Eckstein in retirement sits on the beach, reading his newspaper with its accounts of the fluctuations of markets and current events, as cyclical as the tide that comes in and out along the shore. Meanwhile, life goes on around him: there is a baptism in the water, elaborately uniformed military officers scan the distant shore through binoculars from the vantage point of a comfortable hotel, a cow appears magically in the surf, a makeshift hospital fills to overflowing.

This might all sound a bit schematic, and to some extent it is, but generally Kentridge implies meanings rather than spelling them out. He thinks in terms of images, and the images have a poetic charge, a mystery to them. The film consists of a sequence of these images flowing one into the next, opening up a cumulative series of interpretative possibilities. Mind you, it is reasonable to draw some fairly gloomy conclusions: the markets continue blithely on their course, indifferent to events on a human scale, though there are suggestions that perhaps the newspapers should be tracing human feelings and the quality of life rather than something so intrinsically inhumane. Aids ravages the population.

The cow, a symbolic, sacrificial figure, is rendered to nothing, as is pretty much everything and everyone in the end. Officialdom is engrossed in its own pomposity and has nothing to contribute.

Kentridge's animation technique is avowedly primitive and rough-hewn. The drawings, which are very good, have a fast, brusque look about them. But the rudimentary nature of the process and the speed of the drawings contribute to a tremendous, quivering liveliness. The blur of successive images across the paper has a ghostly resonance and some of the effects, notably to do with waves breaking - around the mass of the cow, for example - are really beautiful to look at.

Another of the films, Journey to the Moon, is an explicit homage to a renowned early example of the magic of cinema by Georges Melies. Kentridge relates to the ad hoc inventiveness of the pioneering cinematographer, who reputedly discovered the possibilities of stop-motion trickery by accident when his camera jammed.

The imagination is capable of magical transports, Kentridge seems to imply in his lunar quest. But at the same time, echoing the melancholy note of Tide Table, it is clear that imagination cannot rescue us from time or loss, and is no substitute for the irreplaceable human presence.

Tide Table is at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, The Mall, Sligo until Oct 30. Opens at the Limerick City Gallery, Nov 12, and the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, Jan 20, 2006