What makes the visual element of this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival so successful is not only the work's quality but the clever use of locations, each with its own strong identity, writes Aidan Dunne

In recent years Kilkenny's visual arts strand has been consolidated into three geographical locations, all of which now have strong and distinctive identities. There is Kilkenny itself, which centres on the Butler Gallery and usually one other major venue, a moveable feast that this year occupies a space in the Market Cross car park. Then there is Thomastown, where the Grennan Mill makes an extremely good gallery complex. And, of course, there is Kells, the venue for Sculpture at Kells, which in no time at all has developed into a top-notch exhibition (despite missing out last year).

Sure, it is helped along by having an outstandingly beautiful location, in the form of Kells Priory and the mill on the King's River, but what clinches it is the quality of the work and the tactful treatment of the setting.

In Kilkenny, the two main exhibitions involve radically different approaches. Down at the Market Cross, a temporary structure (designed by architect Orna Hanly) provides a high, bright airy venue for Sight Specific, a substantial show devoted to the work of seven diverse painters.

Up at the Butler - which does its own programming - in the Castle, meanwhile, a representative show of the work of iconoclastic Californian artist Paul McCarthy represents quite another strand of contemporary tradition. McCarthy's work stems from the radical departures of the 1960s and is rooted in performance and video documentation.

Sight Specific was unveiled, as part of the launch of the festival, on Friday night by poet Theo Dorgan, who spoke wittily about the uneasy relationship between art and commerce. The Sight Specific show draws attention to the fact that painting is out of favour with a significant proportion of the art world. You can interpret this in a number of ways. There is an active antagonism towards painting on the part of some, and indifference and incomprehension on the part of others. There is also, of course, the lure of exciting new technologies. And there is the fact that the curatorial profession is as conformist as any; nobody wants to be caught offside. The implicit question posed by this show is whether paintings on a wall can still engage us in a meaningful way.

There is an apparent distinction between abstraction and figuration in Clare O'Donoghue's selection. But such hard and fast divisions tend to break down on closer scrutiny. In a way, the painters included have little in common other than their chosen medium. There is the austere, stubborn, grid-based abstraction of Sean Scully. But this work actually has little to do with self-contained formalism. Apart from the nuances of his tone and colour, Scully's paintings are also surprisingly muted and vulnerable in their language of touch and texture. Perhaps Sean Shanahan has the more austere sensibility, with his extraordinarily eloquent monochrome expanses.

There are intimations of space and place in the rich tonality of Felim Egan's work, although he too could certainly be described as an abstract painter. Richard Gorman's elegant parabolas and impeccable colour sense draw us inexorably into their surfaces. Tony Bevan, known as a figurative painter, is here fascinated by the way pattern articulates space. It is good to see Patrick Graham, who seems to exhibit only rarely in Ireland, painting so well in his new work, creating an extraordinary surface suffused with a silvery grey light. Brian Maguire's fiercely engaged stance comes through in every mark he makes.

The Butler's McCarthy show is a landmark in that it is the first substantial show of his work in Ireland. That work, which is definitely not for the faint-hearted, has often been approached in terms of Julia Kristeva's idea of the abject body. Certainly his body-centred actions, performances and quasi-dramas become progressively messier as they proceed. He uses vast quantities of processed foods such as ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard and other products (he's partial to sausages for their prosthetic and other possibilities) in lieu of body fluids and bits. There is this cumulative, dispiriting sense of the body being engulfed by its own waste. Add to that the futility of purpose and desire suggested by endlessly repetitive patterns of movements - such as his self-battering Rocky - and obsessive, desultory sexual activity, and you have a fairly bleak picture of existence.

As he has gone on, McCarthy's work has become more and more self-conscious and contrived, with a heavier emphasis on nudge-nudge humour. In Painters, he satirises the art world, with a cartoon de Kooning wrestling with giant tubes of paint, and pretentious collectors and art world types. The rarefied fine art culture is ripe for satire, but perhaps he should have shown wealthy patrons saying how much they liked the way their new Paul McCarthy video so effectively undermined bourgeois values. That would have encapsulated a central contradiction of the art world and of art's attempts to outflank itself.

AT THE National Craft Gallery, Of Colour in Craft is a generous, extremely beautiful show, a real treat for the eye. It was selected by Brian Kennedy, who ranges across craft disciplines with an unerring instinct not only for colour but also for form and vision. There is none of the "craft is good for you" worthiness that can detract from shows of craft work.

Rather, there is a positively celebratory quality to, for example, the display of masses of candles by Larry Kinsella or turned, dyed wood bowls by Roger Bennett.

Cormac Boydell's ceramics are incredible, ravishingly coloured objects. Among the exceptional fabric pieces are Rachel O'Connell's cushions and a bedspread by Beth Moran. Des Doyle's rubber necklace and dyed paper necklaces by Angela O'Kelly show how far Kennedy has ranged in his selection. A colourist himself, he is aware that colour can be used subtly, as in Catherina Donnelly's dark runner.

The show is accompanied by a publication, designed by Coracle, that is a thing of beauty in itself, and incorporates a terrific text by Marianne Mays, for a modest €9.

At Thomastown, three shows that complement each other well share the Grennan Mill. Rebecca McLynn's soft, atmospheric mixed media paintings, photographs, drawings and small, hand-made books make up a compendium of remote and desolate environments - bleak but also inviting and affirmative. Her achievement is to convey these linked qualities.

From a Scottish sea-going family, Will MacLean makes sculptures, sculptural reliefs and paintings steeped in the history, heritage and spirit of maritime communities. It is impossible to do justice to its layers of references in this space.

Marie Foley's sculpture and drawings, on the top storey of the mill, elaborate her distinctive language of form and materials. Apart from individual objects, their lines sensitively teased out by following the inclinations of the materials - typically wood, metal, stone - the other side of her artistic character is represented by a rigorously ordered feeling for ritualised responses to natural processes and rhythms.

There are certain correspondences between her work and that of Rachel Parry, showing at Rudolf Heltzel in Kilkenny. A series of what might be described as sculptural garments, composed of such striking materials as spider's webs, chillis and shed snake skins, are intricately and ingeniously made and charged with personal symbolic significance. Parry's phrase "clothes for the spirit" is just right.

Also at Thomastown, at the Berkley Gallery, Robert Frazier shows exceptional carved stone and glass sculptures, together with Bridget Flannery's outstanding muted paintings, with their evocations of heightened, charged spaces.

At Kells, the work of Naoko Akiyama has an exceptionally evocative, poignant quality. In No Reason to Smile, a life-size, seated paper figure will gradually be taken over by the environment as grass seeds sprout from within. More durably, a ghostly, standing figure gazes perpetually out through a window of the mill, waiting. Akiyama is but one of many participating artists whose work fits almost uncannily well into the Priory and its surroundings.

Another is Peter Randall-Page, the most heavily represented. The first thing you see are his huge patterned banners on the wall of the mill, a prelude to his series of drawings of walnuts inside and a group of stone sculptures.

They all have in common a tremendous sense of coiled, compacted energy. As it happens, Randall-Page has used the distinctive Kilkenny blue limestone for many years, so it's hardly surprising that the work looks at home here, as with Alan Counihan's egg-like vessels and his audacious winged form.

Darren O'Connor's two great, silenced bells, sited among the stones, are incredibly apposite, and Niall Walsh's two standing, burnt-wood sarcophagi are eerily atmospheric.

But Kells can also accommodate temperamentally different work, such as Susan Collis's clever, eye-deceiving Concrete Evidence or Dan Chadwick's wonderful, luminous green mobile.

Between Kilkenny and Kells, signs direct you to Burnchurch, where Helena Gorey and Peter Scroope occupy a studio and a stable respectively. It is a fine setting for their work. A large, impassive painting of uniform horizontal bands by Gorey (you might guess its previous function) is juxtaposed with two reflective, hypnotic videos that draw on similar banded imagery.

Scroope's exquisite porcelain vessels are accompanied by another video, as rain and light, in combination with what look like powdered glazes, create beautiful, complex colour compositions on the earth.

At Gallery One, Rachel Burke and Dominique van den Broeck both show paintings. Burke's strong, densely worked compositions are explorations of place and memory, as layered images reconstruct remembered landscapes and snatches of handwritten text hint at layers of feelings.

Van den Broeck's gentle paintings explore a number of staple subjects. They include nice studies of Parisian rooftops and serene interiors.

At Butler House, meanwhile, Clare Langan's chilly Forty Below, a bleak vision of a glacial world post-environmental catastrophe makes a fitting elegy to an Irish summer.

Kilkenny Arts Festival continues until Sunday. www.kilkennyarts.ie