Reviewed:

Absolut Classics, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until September 1st (01-6708055)

The Blackcurrant Field, Helena Gorey, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until September 8th (01-8740064)

Judy Hamilton and Josephine Kelly, Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until August 25th (01-6617286)

In 1985, Andy Warhol made a brightly coloured acrylic and silk-screen study of an Absolut Vodka bottle. It was the first of hundreds of artworks to take the Swedish company's product as its subject, and it is included in Absolut Classics, comprising a representative sample of those works, at the Rubicon Gallery in Dublin. On the evidence of this show, Warhol's remains one of the best pieces in the collection. It is, so to speak, an absolute corker, probably because his style naturally straddled the worlds of art and advertising.

Inevitably, that is the no-man's-land occupied by the collection. You could choose to view it as a brilliant marketing ploy, cleverly cloaking the evils of alcohol with the glamour of celebrity art, or, equally, as an agreeably anomalous, offbeat project. The impressive roll-call of names, from Damien Hirst to Peter Blake, suggests artists are only too happy to accept Absolut's invitation to produce something incorporating the bottle, adding a new dimension to the concept of product placement. But it is up to the artists to do their own thing.

To mark the Irish show, Absolut invited Michael Kane to produce a piece of work. With his brusque expressionist style and feeling for urban angst, Kane is not the most obvious choice for this kind of thing. And he hasn't gone out of his way to ingratiate himself with the marketing department.

While, apparently, no artist has yet responded with a contemporary take on Degas's melancholy absinthe drinkers - though Blake alludes more cheerfully to the link between alcohol and creativity - Kane's rough-hewn still life has more of a morning-after feel to it than the heady rush of the night before.

Warhol didn't invent the notions of artist as celebrity and artwork as a means of self-promotion, but he approached it with something like genius. In a way, the Absolut art project is a barometer of artists' relationship to their style as an advertisement for themselves.

The bottle just takes the place of Chris Ofili's usual subject matter, for example, and comes equipped with his trademark legs of elephant dung. Maurizio Cattelan, know for his theatrical installations, produces what could be a straightforward advertisement, and, it has to be said, many of the works appeared as advertisements.

Whatever your feelings about the ethics of the project, artists often perform best when operating within given constraints, and much of the fascination of the show is in seeing how they rise to the challenge.

Helena Gorey is a low-key painter who has built up a substantial body of thoughtful, introspective work, the moody, tonal character of which can obscure her feeling for colour. She is also a restless artist who has never settled into a fixed pattern, consistently looking to move on.

The enduring core of her concern seems to be to convey the atmospheric essence of a thing in terms of, primarily, colour. Much of her work has been devoted to attempting to answer the question of what sort of format or container you put your colour into.

Mark Rothko is an obvious point of reference here, and an unparalleled exemplar. It seemed that Gorey's line of exploration culminated in a series of work made in the late 1990s, inspired by a trip to the United States and consisting of juxtaposed monochrome panels.

Yet in The Blackcurrant Field, her new show at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, she, perhaps characteristically, hasn't really followed up the personal challenges posed by this work. Rather, she has changed tack and is working in gouache, on a much smaller scale, with a much higher level of detail.

Inspired by the rhythmic temporal and spatial patterns she observed in the field of the title, the gouaches are a schematic account of landscape. The series is dominated by a wavering grid, for the most part divided by a single stark horizontal line. Although the work is very well made and carefully judged, it is, overall, executed in a methodical way that comes across at times as being a bit too mechanical, particularly given the exceptionally small scale. When, in number 36 in the exhibition, she momentarily breaks out and allows herself a freer, more flexible touch, it's like a breath of fresh air.

Two landscape painters share the Ashford Gallery. Judy Hamilton's freely brushed accounts of water and land are spontaneous and boldly stated. She clearly enjoys the business of painting, the way the give and take of pigment affords opportunities of discovering counterparts for the lush intermingling of colour and texture in the fields, lakes and rivers. This enjoyment comes through. She is more confident on a smaller scale, but well up to the challenge of the larger pieces.

Josephine Kelly uses paint more thinly and heightens her palette, using a lot of red, particularly. She is also more formal, tending to break down the randomness of the landscape into blocks and patterns, but there is as yet an overly predictable, almost generic quality to her work.