Around 1986, Dutch artist Mark Manders, then aged 18, had a good idea, and he's been running with it ever since.

Reviewed

Mark Manders: Parallel Occurrence, Irish Museum of Modern Art until May 29 01-6129900

The idea was Self-Portrait as a Building, and it was so good - poetic, resonant, full of potential - that it became an ongoing project, a catchall for his many sculptural installation and other works. IMMA's Parallel Occurrence marshals a number of installations, drawings and a video, all of which come under the Self-Portrait . . . rubric.

There is a complication. Rather than trying to actually make a self-portrait in terms of the substance and contents of a building, Manders introduces a layer of distance between himself and the portrait. The notional building, in its state of continual flux, relates not to Manders per se but to an alter ego, a fictional entity, who shares his name.

The manifestations of the various states and aspects of the building that we see are derived from the mental processes of this alter ego, "halted or congealed at their moment of greatest intensity". It's a roundabout rationale, and one you'd need to be appraised of before taking on the exhibition itself, which might otherwise appear as a late, offhand postscript to surrealism. In fact, it is, in many respects, in the way Manders takes for granted the freedoms instituted by surrealism's appeal to the unconscious. But, while the self-portrait as building metaphor seems strained and tenuous at times, it is also oddly compelling and plausible, and not unrelated to what Irish artist Mark Garry does, in attempting to find alternative ways of describing consciousness.

Certainly Manders' work has a distinctive character. It is downbeat, morbid, obsessive, enervated, sometimes opaquely personal, and suggestive of something like dread or horror at the vacuousness of things. That is, the things collectively making up, most likely, conventionally structured existence. He likes playing with scale, and tends to situate his human and animal figures in a creepy, ambiguous "congealed" state, between life and death. The architectural and provisional, forward-looking nature of the installations may seem to hold out some sort of promise or hope for the future as a work-in-progress, but Manders is having none of that.

He's not the only relatively young European artist whose work comes across as being haunted by dystopian visions. The inward- and backward-looking quality is also there in the even more extreme installations of the German artist Gregor Schneider, for example.

He, like Manders, has an ongoing project that could be described as a self-portrait in the form of a building. It is in fact his own house, which has become a chamber of existential horrors. And it is hard to imagine Manders' installations without another German, Joseph Beuys.

In his installation Isolated Bathroom, Manders' use of modelled clay figures, and amorphous mounds of clay under plastic sheeting in a schematic "bath", together with other items of a forensic, documentary nature, recall Beuys's extraordinary feeling for the powerful associations wrapped up in the direct, pungent presence of certain materials and objects. These associations often have to do with painful, disturbing memories, with a past too awful to contemplate, for whatever reason. Except that, in Beuys's case, the work itself effectively conjures up what cannot be otherwise approached or articulated.

Some of Manders' installations are very elaborate and sculptural, others sketchy and ephemeral, such as floor plans laid out with pencils and markers arranged end to end, tubes of paint, jars and other domestic items. His drawings have an air of childish petulance, as though he is too impatient to spend time on them or amend them. Yet, as is evident in his other work, he can be precise and exacting. Not to mention arbitrary.

Beuys's works usually had a traceable theoretical underpinning, related to the personal mythology of his own past history and the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. His sculptures are usually either relics or reliquaries, harnessing the energy of the real to terrific effect. Manders is much more of a maker. He has a taste for creating arbitrarily weird and physically substantial forms that begin with a point of domestic familiarity and take off into the realm of disturbed fantasy.

They often have something to do with buildings and figures, such as the hybrid of a torso with protruding chimneys in Small Isolated Room. Not to say that it is particularly derivative, but in a usefully comparative way, Manders' employment of tubing, chimneys, piping and references to machines recalls Beuys' concern with the concept of and transmission of energy.

The work that provides the show's title, Parallel Occurrence, is perhaps the best piece in it. It has a feeling of containment and stifled domesticity. A fox is suspended by its tail from an upended table, which itself is perched atop what looks like a wardrobe, except that the wardrobe is a sealed unit with no means of access. The chain from which the fox hangs is held in place by a block of metal some distance away. There is an envelope attached to the fox's snout.

As with Beuys, Manders here draws out the generally latent expressiveness of ordinary things and materials. Even without any coherent interpretation - as if the elements made up a kind of crossword clue that we might solve - we can get a sense of thwarted possibilities, of curdled loss, in the physical properties and circular logic of the piece. And there is more than a hint of menace in the fox's plight, even though an air of stylised unreality attends the whole scene. It's a memorable, disturbing tableau.

Overall though, despite its relative strengths, Manders' work is uneven, even though, it must be said, he sets out to make it difficult for us to pass any value judgements on it. Given that, it still seems fair to suggest that his knack for generating compelling images is inclined to lapse into an arbitrary, offbeat quirkiness.