Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne:There is something cheerful and cheering about Stephen McKenna's exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery, Contrasts and Complementaries.

It's a busy show, full of colour and life, and all the paintings that comprise it are based on studies made in three port cities: Naples, Porto and Lisbon. In all of these, it seems, the weather forecast looks pretty good. If you're heading for the gallery, prepare for balmy days enlivened by that essential sea breeze, and warm evenings with the comforting glow of electric light reflected in nice patterns in the water.

McKenna has something in common with David Hockney in his approach to landscape. They share a bluff, no-nonsense directness of gaze, and a commitment to the nuts and bolts of making a painting. They positively relish the problems entailed in devising simplified visual descriptions of an infinitely complex world. It's instantly apparent that McKenna's paintings greatly simplify their subjects, leaving out a great deal, for example. Yet they have great atmospheric integrity, perhaps because he is carefully attentive to optical effects, relaying the effect of heat haze on a distant mountain, for example, with obstinate, pedantic precision.

In editing out a great deal, and to a large extent abstracting from the mass of data available, he conjures up an immensely attractive world. Previously he has produced paintings that itemise occupations (he may still be pursuing the theme), and in these and other of his works there is a strong implicit sense of community, of the co-operative social fabric, and that comes across in his evocations of cities in this show as well. This is so even though he doesn't particularly focus on people. You just get the feeling that these are places shaped and organised for the benefit of people, rather than the other way around - which may, in fact, be closer to the truth in most cities.

As versions of reality, the paintings have some of the qualities of scale models or virtual worlds - an appealing, toy-like clarity. To some extent then, they are utopian paintings, if modestly so. The spaces they depict are clean, orderly, attractive; the wider settings are generally beautiful; and there is a wealth of felicitous detail. It's a world as it should be, and in places is, at least partly.

For purely selfish reasons, any of them would be good to own. Having one on the wall would make you think of how nice the world can be. For similar reasons, the show is more than worth seeing. En masse the paintings make up a terrific, sunny environment, packed with visual as well as intellectual delights.

One day, Micheal Minnis, who is based in Co Clare, came across a book of photographs in Limerick city, an album dating from 1989 celebrating the Ukrainian City of Dnipropetrovsk. An architecturally striking place, it enjoyed favoured status as a centre of political power and military technology during the Soviet era - though that latter role meant it was a closed city into the 1990s and was inaccessible to westerners. Here, and Nowhere Else, Minnis's ambitious exhibition at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, featuring paintings, video and photographic documentation, stems directly from his chance encounter with the Dnipropetrovsk album.

He visited the city and photographed many of the locations featured in the book. The explanatory note accompanying the show says, accurately enough, that it "explores memory, time and displacement", and that the original photographs have a "dream-like unreal quality", which they certainly do. They, and Dnipropetrovsk itself, are positively startling, perhaps because they and it represent a corner of the planet that was invisible to outsiders for so long. More than that, though, the city has an air of retrospective modernity, a nostalgia for the future attendant on past visions of tomorrow's world.

The city is futuristic in a way that seems already dated, but this is not meant disparagingly. Minnis is creditably sensitive in his treatment of the material, carefully exploring its nuances, even when prompting our realisation that, in its post-war incarnation, the city was from the first something slightly unreal, a representation of idealised Soviet modernity, perhaps even a kind of theatre or circus, like the circus building he happened upon when he was there.

Dnipropetrovsk has a much longer history, of course. For example, its once-thriving, sizeable Jewish population was virtually exterminated when the German army conquered the city during the second World War.

Minnis's two-screen video evokes a sense of time and timelessness that can accommodate the longer view. Having dealt with the fabric of modernity, these slow, real-time accounts of sunrise on the Dnieper lend perspective, and allow space for contemplation. One of the strengths of his show is the way it invites us to explore for ourselves and experience the various layers of time and space in the city.

Another show at the City Gallery, Art from the Rucksack 3: Ireland/Japan Exchange Exhibition, needn't worry about its carbon footprint.

It's a show that really does look as if it travelled light, but it is not insubstantial. A half-dozen artists feature, and they all do something striking. They had to carry their work with them, but they were permitted to source materials locally and had a week to work on their pieces.

Yuki Tsukiyama's outstanding work is inspired by the rituals of the sporting arena, something as relevant to Limerick as to Japan, and readily comprehensible. He has made an altar-like representation of a playing field, and it is the focal point in a room that also contains several thoughtful ancillary works. Also impressive is Masako Nakazawa's ceramic piece. She says that working with clay is a metaphor for the fragility of human existence, and bears out the claim with her mosaic pot containing a pair of sculpted hands, a beautiful work that one hopes will remain in Ireland.

Kenichi Higashino perpetuates the tradition of the storyteller and maker of scroll paintings, live and on video, though the dramatic aquarium setting for his video tends to steal the show. The remaining three artists emphasise productivity: Aya Sakoda's multiple dolls and clay impressions; Tomoko Sugiyama's very effective language of basic visual signs (house, field, star . . . ); and Yukinori Yamamura's shamrock suit, which features in myriad photographs of the artist at home in Kobe, as a kind of Irish ambassador.

Contrasts and Complementaries: Stephen McKenna. Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

Until Oct 13

Here, and Nowhere Else: Michael Minnis. Art from the Rucksack 3: Ireland/Japan Exchange Exhibition: Yamamura Yukinori, Sugiyama Tomoko, Tsukiyama Yuki, Sakoda Aya, Nakazama Masako and Higashino Kenichi. Limerick City Gallery of Art.

Until Oct 21