Looking twice at Manet

The Tuileries Incident, Mick Wilson, Hugh Lane Gallery until December 12th

Giuseppe Penone, Douglas Hyde Gallery until December 4th

Knots & Ogham, John Noel Smith, Green on Red Gallery, until November 20th.

From the Hand, John Gibbons, and Stupa, Brian Henderson, Taylor Galleries until Oct 30

David Quinn, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until November 13th

Crimes Against Humanity, Tony Crosbie, City Arts Centre until November 13th

Valerie Douglas, The Bridge Gallery until November 10th

In his notes on The Tuileries Incident, Mick Wilson makes the startling admission that, while he was lecturing on Manet's painting Le Musique aux Tuileries at NCAD, he was unaware that the real thing was hanging on the wall of the Hugh Lane just up the road. Evidence, he concludes, that modern art exists through reproduction. Evidence as well, he concedes, that he should have been up looking at the paintings in the gallery. Primary sources can so easily confound received truths.

Now he's making amends in the form of a penitentially didactic, though entertaining, installation built around Manet's painting, which is still there, on the wall, but not for long. Under the terms of the Lane Bequest agreement, in December it will be off to London. If Wilson's project encourages you to look, or look again, at Manet, it will have been worthwhile.

He considers the view of its original exhibition as a pivotal moment of Modernism, in which the casual, chaotic spectacle of urban life - actually Manet himself and various friends and personalities of the time - challenged the artistic order. His title, and the twin video projections at the heart of his work, are indebted - sorry to mention it again so soon, but there you are - to Antonioni's Blow-Up, which has proved a veritable gold mine for artists.

On one screen, a man's face looking at the Manet but distracted, on the other, a shifting view of the painting's surface. The encouragement to look, the difficulty of seeing, the impossibility of knowing what is really going on. Both images are filtered so that it is difficult to read them; the equivalent, Wilson says, of Manet's unadorned brushwork. Turn your attention to the work itself, and you'll see that it is still an incredibly fresh piece of painting.

Giuseppi Penone, who was associated with the Arte Povera movement, makes very subtle, even gentle, works about breath or soffio. A series of photographs from the 1970s records a puff of breath, a miniature cloud floating through the lush space of a densely vegetated forest. The images are beautiful and the clouds dispersing in the air are an eloquent statement of lightness. A big heap of leaves on the gallery floor bears the imprint of a human figure. A plume of exhaled air, like a word balloon in a comic, is given the same weight as the figure imprinted on the leaves. Wall drawings record "ripples" extending through the whole fabric of the gallery from the touch of Penone's fingertips. It's agreeable, thoughtful work, a meditative oasis in the rush of the city outside.

John Noel Smith is an immensely capable painter with a penchant for puns and literary allusions, something that could be fatal to the paintings but isn't. Knots & Ogham sees him meditating on his most enduring preoccupation, Irish identity. His viewpoint is Berlin, where he lives and where the layers of history are as complex and as current as they are here. He makes luscious surfaces layered with pure, singing colour. There are layers of meaning as well: intractable knots in the form of shamrock laid over a tricolour, a grid sliding off the surface. They are enjoyable and engaging on many levels.

In Ireland, John Gibbons last showed big constructed steel sculptures in Dublin and Kilkenny. A wonderfully fluent sculptor of steel, many of his pieces suggested enclosures of various kinds that might contain figures. His new work, called From the Hand, couldn't be more different.

Most of the pieces are tiny, and often they bear the direct, unmediated imprint of the hand that modelled the wax from which moulds were made. They are actually a series of families of little objects, from a group of overtly vulvate and phallic forms, or the grisly Aztec Heart, to the strange creatures in Lords of the Under- world that seem to be derived from a kind of Lord of the Rings fantasy. Gibbons carries over the same fluency into this miniature work, which has the urgency and assurance of style instituted by Rodin.

Frank Stella is the giant at Brian Henderson's shoulder. An Irishman who moved to New York at 21, Henderson is a very capable artist. One strand of the work he's currently exhibiting continues his uneasy dialogue with Stella: coloured, painted paper collages. They are more relaxed, less dogmatic than his previous work, and suggest that he is exploring his own instincts more. The other strand, four tall sculptures, are quite different. Ciaran Bennett points out some of the eclectic influences that inform them, from Brancusi to the water towers perched on New York's sky-scrapers. Like Mondrian's grids, your first impression is of seamless, impassive geometry, then you realise that they have vulnerable, fallible surfaces.

David Quinn's show consists of a series of subdued studies of a cultivated Mayo landscape, Munnadesha. The dominant colour is green, with some blue in the sky. The forms are broadly stated, with little detail, so that the overall effect is of an abstracted, distilled landscape. Yet the variations in tone and mood that unfold as you work your way around the walls reveal a genuine subtlety. Quinn simplifies, but is atmospherically precise. In this he strikes a chord with the work of Pat Harris, whose North Mayo landscapes, at the Linenhall in Castlebar until Saturday, are beautiful exercises in pared-down painting.

There is a passionate directness to Tony Crosbie's work in Crimes Against Humanity. His best pieces are murky charcoal drawings which place us outside the concentration camp wire, only dimly aware of what's going on beyond, and stark, unadorned, graphic paintings of brutal acts. We never see the faces of the oppressors, our viewpoint is with the kneeling or falling victims. To Crosbie's credit, he manages to erode any comfortable distance we might put between ourselves and the awfulness of what is going on, and he avoids engaging in the pornography of violence in depicting it: this isn't Hollywood.

On a different note entirely, Valerie Douglas's Orosto paintings are inspired by Portugal. They are evocations of heat haze and almond blossom, and on a large scale they don't all manage to avoid becoming syrupy sweet. But at their best they recall Eithne Jordan's paintings of France with their close tones and soft, amorphous surfaces.