On Friday 12Th June, Carol and I visited N.C.A.D. to see the Graduate Show. First we went around the sculpture class display on the ground floor of the Granary Building. I had been expecting to see another disaster of a show – like in previous years. However with a few exceptions this year’s work appeared to have more thought and work put into it than before, as well as being more commercial and eager to please. Yet again, there were few if any original ideas, the work failed to live up to rigourous, professional, installation art and lacked convincing artistic personas. As a painter I thought it quite funny that merely dressing up in costumes, waiting on the end of phone lines or moving various found objects around a room or out of doors was still considered relevant or an aesthetic achievement.

Then we went to see the Print Department which in previous years had always been a favourite of mine. Yet again much of the work had an illustrational and juvenile feel. Yet again childhood memories had been raided and delivered in a rather limited art-brut, comic book style. Much of the work blended into one amorphous mass of seemingly identical Irish middleclass childhoods. I noticed that the darker, more difficult or subtly skilful works had sold far less this year than the kitsch, gimmicky and conventional works. Many of what I thought to be the very best works in print and painting had not sold. This year’s show was not as good as previous years with a few notable exceptions like Killian Dunne, Berenice Prendiville, Jill French and most particularly the evocative and sensual draughtsman and print maker Emily Robyn Archer. I also loved Archer’s stop-motion video of one of her drawings being made - which was infinitely more entertaining than most of the video work on offer.

In the print and painting departments there were various attempts to produce works of contemporary relevance – people with masks in the age of swine-flu, or faceless people were popular tropes. Indeed many of these works concealed as much as they revealed. There was little of the narcissistic and exhibitionistic daring of previous years - perhaps a reflection of how the age of self-revelation had given way to the age of privacy-wars. I had hoped to see work that in some way registered the corrupt, decadent, bankrupt and apocalyptic times we were living in – but no - everything in the love boat of N.C.A.D. was carrying on as normal.

Then we visited the Painting Department. Here too 50% of the class could have been lumped into one student listening patently to their tutors and fellow students and painting like them. Two exceptions stood out – one irrelevant and the other outstanding. The first was a series of abstract paintings by Natasha Conway influenced by School of Paris abstracts circa 1953 – particularly Nicholas de Stael, Raoul Ubac and Jean Deyrolle. They were not a patch on their sources – which apart from de Stael were tedious enough to begin with. They were the most redundant works on show - but at least Conway had looked at something made before 1995.

The shining star of the entire year of 2009 though was Christina Bunello. Her smoothly painted portraits of a young Irish neighbourhood girl were technically stunning, understated, stripped down and haunting. Gerhard Richter’s blurred portraits came to mind but not in an obvious way. Bunello’s stylish, high-keyed paintings were at once mindful of history and embedded in contemporary art. Carol liked the way the paintings matched the size of the TV screen showing the video she had taken of the girl and liked the fact that she had not been tempted to overload her display with too much work. None of her paintings would have looked out of place in a museum. That night her paintings continued to burn on my retinas. I looked forward to seeing how she would develop in the future.

Other promising contemporary painters were Margret McKeever, William O’Neill, Ronan Bergin, and Sarah Tynan. And I was very amused and moved by Ciara McMahon’s video piece from her Mutual: Esteem site specific art event with an elderly choir singing out of tune and looking rather bewildered by the purpose of the event.

Finally before leaving, we looked around the Ceramics Department – which in past years had often been a highlight. This year’s body of work was fairly dumb – epitomised by the clumsy figurines of Gillian Joyce who sculpted famous people in art-historical parodies; Obama as The Statue of Liberty, Ronald Mc Donald at the last supper, Russell Brand as Adam and so on. It was eye-catching and moderately skilled work with more attitude than profundity – the art of Capo-di-Monte rendered in a ham-fisted Spitting Image kind of way. Yet, at least her work registered a larger world outside of academia or the counters of The Kilkenny Design Shop. The one exception to this for me was Kim Murphy with her thoughtful and delicate Lithophanes made from ultra thin ceramic - which shown lit from behind - revealed ghostly images of faceless people taken from old black and white family photographs. They represented the enigmas of reproduction, seeing and knowing.

Trying to take in a show like this was always delightful, irritating, surprising and exhausting – like a giant treasure hunt. It was easy to completely miss seeing artworks tucked away, or seeing but not really looking through fatigue. By the end of the Ceramics Department, I was suffering from picture blindness – a complete inability to look at another thing. Some students made things worse by insisting on showing too many works.

We decided not to go to the Media Department to watch indulgent and incompetent cable TV stuff. We also thought our lives were too short to waste going to the Master’s Exhibition in the Digital Hub – further up Thomas Street. I had no interest in seeing artists who had become dead inside and professional and calculated to the point of robots.