Visual Arts: Aidan Dunne reviews  Blaise Smith: Paintings and Eurojet Futures 2004.

Writing in the catalogue of his exhibition at the Molesworth Gallery, Blaise Smith departs from convention in discussing, in great detail, how he went about making the paintings we can see on the walls. Eschewing questions of meaning or critical theory, his essay is an exceptionally frank and informative account of his working methods. In his book Secret Knowledge, David Hockney points out how painters have, for centuries, jealously guarded the secrets of their trade. Smith, you could say, cheerfully dispenses trade secrets as he goes, secure in the knowledge that information in itself does not a picture make.

That is down to something else: ability honed by experience, a lengthy working process. Against the odds, given the general trend in the art world over the last few decades, Smith is one of a number of younger Irish artists to have adopted a representational mode of painting. He is a realist in the sense that he takes his cue not from generic convention but from a desire to provide in paint an accurate equivalent of visual reality.

In his case, that reality is predominantly rural. An important exemplar here, figuratively if not literally, is Martin Gale (whose Nissan Art Award exhibition opens at the Ulster Museum early in December). One of Gale's achievements has been to replace a romanticised version of landscape with a distinctly de-glamourised, recognisable rural world. There are many differences between his work and Smith's, but they have in common this fidelity to the facts.

It's become a cliché to label realism as photographic. Smith may surprise some observers by pointing out that he never works from photographs. "There actually isn't enough information in a photograph." He lives through the experience of making a painting in the presence of its subject. He's there on the spot. Given the substantial scale of many of the paintings in his current show, that's quite a task.

His subjects include functional farmyards complete with tractors and other machines, muddy fields and - a particularly good painting - a flooded laneway, its bordering hedgerows spattered with mud. He favours horizontal formats, calm compositional rhythms with strong planar arrangements. There is a quality of quiet, sustained engagement in the paintings that makes sense when we learn of the long hours that go into each image, and there is also a stubborn, uncompromising aspect to them, an insistence on telling it as it is. As he reports in the catalogue, he spent a long time searching for his subjects, and he knew what he was looking for only when he found them.

This year's Eurojet Futures 2004, strictly speaking the penultimate in the series, is in a sense the last because next year's curtain call will feature all 27 artists who have participated. Futures has served as a successor to the GPA Emerging Artists and, to a lesser extent, the Glen Dimplex series of exhibitions as showcases for younger Irish artists. The final round-up, a de facto survey of contemporary Irish art by younger artists, should indicate the viability of the judgment that went into it.

If the current show is any indication, it should fare OK in that regard. The five participating artists, selected by the Gallagher Gallery's director Pat Murphy with Ruth Carroll, are individually strong and comprise a broad range of approaches - from the cutting-edge digital technology of John Gerrard to the art-activism of Nevan Lahart.

Perhaps the most impressive is Sonia Suominen, who stood out at this year's Dún Laoghaire graduate show with the same body of work on display here. As it happens, her photographs, in the tradition of objective documentary photography overseen by Bernd and Hilla Becher, anatomise the Royal Hibernian Academy building itself. Amid much else, they allow, but don't over-emphasise, a metaphorical reading equating building and person, and visually they are disciplined and extremely well judged. It seems a pity that the artist has in the meantime returned to her native Finland to pursue her work.

Martin Healy's photographic and video work on the New Jersey Devil bring us into Blair Witch Project territory. Otherwise workaday New Jersey landscapes are infused with menace in the photographs, and the flickering images of the video leave room for our own darkest imaginings. The most disturbing photograph, of an inflatable snowman next to the strung-up carcass of a deer, implies that the devils might be much closer than we think to comfortable domesticity, rather than lurking in the deep dark woods. Healy seems primarily interested in visualising a dark space of the imagination - which he does very effectively.

Ciaran Murphy's paintings, displayed individually and as a cluster, gain from each other in that, in line with a significant strand of contemporary painting, they are fragmentary, tentative and oblique, drawing on second-hand images rather than referring to a primary, unmediated reality. This has to do not so much with a sense of the diminished possibilities of painting itself as with the diminished possibilities of representation in general in the post-modern world. Here, Lahart's fierce, satirical engagement, crude though it can be, is refreshing. He says things that are obvious and overstated - which is no harm - and in so doing manages to underline the fact that such direct engagement has slipped beyond the grasp of the vast majority of current art practice.

Julie Merriman's carbon paper drawings are meditative, architectonic accounts of the faded ambitions of modernist panning. There is a curiously dreamy quality to her layered, overlapping, descriptive drawings of buildings. Her study of a block in Fatima Mansions with mountains of rubble is particularly striking.

Gerrard's work attracts huge audience response. Ingenious, classically beautiful and technologically innovative, it is also genuinely and compellingly interactive, with an air of strangeness and mystery about it.

The Blaise Smith exhibition Paintings is on in the Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, until December 3rd (01-6791548).

The Eurojet Futures 2004 exhibition is on in the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, until January 9th (01-6612558).