ART now has become completely internationalised," says Marcel van Joel, the organiser of Confrontations, an exhibition of contemporary art from Belgium and Luxembourg which, paradoxically, goes along way towards proving his point. "If something happens somewhere one week, by the next week it is all over the world," he says. "I see work all over and I say, "we have someone doing that in Belgium too'."
Van Joel's observation is one that seems to have equal validity in Ireland. Anyone wandering among the works of the more than loo sculptors, photographers and painters taking part in this huge travelling exhibition could easily be struck by some strange coincidences.
Around the gallery walls they may happen upon something that looks very much like the work of a Walloon Alice Maher, a Flemish Eithne Jordan, or a Luxembourgeois Cathy Prendergast. (Notably, however, these continental counterparts are more likely to be male, since the overwhelming majority of the artists represented in Confrontations are men.)
"When I went to the Venice Biennale and swathe Korean Pavilion, I could say that the paper figures there were copied from a Belgian artist called Denmark. But I don't believe that the artist knew anything of Denmark's work. I think sometimes that it is like the invention of penicillin. I mean, Fleming got the credit, but all over the world at that time people were making the discovery."
Nevertheless Van Joel, the author of a half-million-selling series of historical novels exploring such topics as the early life of Rubens, and the place of Jews in Flemish artistic life, believes he can identify certain features which he considers to be in some way characteristic of Belgian art. He feels, for example, that "a sense of the fantastic", a quality much associated with the country's most recognised painter, Rene Magritte, is typical of Belgian art.
Van Joel is, however, not overly concerned with the notion of origins and originality. "My wife would say, `if the artist is the second one to do it, then he is a copier'. But I don't agree. I think you have to judge from the work that has been realised. If that work is good, well, it is better that he took influences from someone who was good than from someone who was bad."