Reviewed:

A World Of Difference, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, until September 2nd (01-6710073)

Maureen Gallace, Paintings, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until September 8th (01-6709093)

There is a Blue Peter-ish appeal to Hendrikje Kuhne and Beat Klein's ironically titled A World Of Difference, with its home-made, paper-and-scissors-and-glue character. It is a sprawling installation spread over the floor of the gallery, a rambling, composite collage of images culled from holiday brochures. Carefully cut out and slotted together, these images make up a maverick scale model of the world as an endless series of interlocking holiday destinations, a vast super-resort. It is, in all, intricate, ingenious, fascinating and, like holidays themselves, perhaps, a bit hellish.

Holiday-brochure imagery typically combines two apparently paradoxical tasks, emphasising the simultaneous sameness and difference of a destination. The sameness is evident in the grids of hotels and apartment blocks and pools, the uniform standards of comfort and climate that we expect. Difference comes under the broad heading of local colour, focused and refined into each destination's notionally unique selling point, its Machu Picchu or pyramids, its Blarney Stone or Eiffel Tower.

It is easy to be critical of mass tourism because, for example, of the despoliation of the landscape, the distortion and even destruction of the character of place, that it entails. But Kuhne and Klein do not moralise, at least overtly. They make a representation of the phenomenon and leave us to draw our own conclusions, though it is a weighted representation.

Apart from the engaging humour of their vision, there is a relentless, nightmarish quality to the jumbled, uncontrollable proliferation of resort imagery, to the sense of the substitution of an endless, self-contained, self-referring theme park for what was once the world - whatever that might be.

The reverse of each cut-out card is left blank, and when you look at the back of the installation you are left with a vision of uniform grey, the drab workaday reality, presumably, to which the colour and spice of holidays will provide an antidote. And, presumably, do. The Swiss writer Max Frisch once defined technology as something like a way of arranging the world so that we don't have to experience it.

The extraordinarily effective technology of air travel and the economics of the mass market - Ryanair, Go, easyJet - have combined to create a kind of global last resort and, arguably, diminished the quality of our experience of the world by changing the nature of what we can experience and how we experience it. But, let's face it, there is no obvious way back. In the meantime, devote 20 minutes or so to Kuhne and Klein's installation.

Maureen Gallace's paintings, at the Kerlin Gallery, evoke holiday feelings and holiday places in a more personal, retrospective way. Her small canvases are impeccably clean-cut. Her images of beach cottages and farmhouses are refined to outlines of storybook simplicity. Her equally pared-down palette is deployed in relatively broad strokes, technically very precise but approximate in the sense of politely declining to get involved in fine detail - note that she likes painting enveloping blankets of snow and sand. This adds to the muted, distancing effect of the pictures.

Gallace grew up in Connecticut and holidayed on Cape Cod, and these are the rather idyllic landscapes she revisits.

Put all of these elements together and you could well end up with a prime slice of nostalgic Americana, a New Yorker-ish fantasy. And you could certainly opt to take her work on that level. In fact, it seems likely that for much of its audience, a large part of its appeal is in those terms.

Although what we see is specific to her experience, local places and landscapes that come attached with precise memories for the artist, the images are also general enough to allow us to identify with the feelings of freedom they suggest and to project our own narratives onto them. So why, one is tempted to ask in the midst of all these feel-good factors, do they not dissolve in a mush of unbearable sweetness? Perhaps because there is a stringency about them.

Gallace is technically very disciplined. Her careful development of her painterly language is austere, no matter how nostalgic or positive her ostensible subject matter. The simplicity she strives for is measured, tough and cautious about what it promises us in terms of pictorial illusion and, concomitantly, emotional reassurance.

Her recognisable antecedents are Edward Hopper, Giorgio Morandi and, perhaps, the singular American painter Alex Katz. The light and clarity of Hopper, and his almost sculptural sense of pictorial form, surely influenced her. An inclination towards abstraction held perpetually in check, characteristic of Morandi, is also true of her approach. Add Katz's combination of what could be emotionally charged subjects and decidedly cool handling and you get a sense of the ambivalence of Gallace's work.

Is there, as the New Yorker suggested, "a frisson of existential unease" about her unpeopled spaces? In a way, perhaps, given that they so clearly set the scene for habitation, are so replete with narrative possibilities, then duck away from the implications. But it wouldn't do to overemphasise any underlying darkness in Gallace's work.

There is room for shadows and anxiety in the world she cumulatively depicts but, more ambitiously, it is an arena for the gamut of our memories, dreams and reflections.