it's DARK @ CoExist Gallery

We're talking about some wacky bloke she met, and how inscrutable and exclusive he seemed to be: doggy style, apparently, he had tiddled on his lamposts and marked his territory as 'Modern' and 'Stuckist', marking his little plot in the great terrain of the visual arts. I hope that's all the doggy style he'll get, too.

Rather than announce - pronounce - one's artistic GPS, some souls send up a flare - and there were several this evening. Not being familiar on video installation, I was shown what it could be: two pieces particularly struck me: Semiconductors' Black Rain, the most beautiful imagery of solar winds, and I don't use the word beautiful at all lightly: there is no greater achievement. And it had a hypnotic beauty, black and white, the abstractions of eclipses like the patterning of an iris, the trajectory of the missile from this NASA footage, and rain, or Coronal Mass Ejections giving an eternal sense of space and weightless time. Is that beauty in the eye of the beholder, or in my perception, or worst, in my taste? I don't think so: others flopped onto the beanbags, the static softness within the boundaries of audability cushioning and enveloping this space. The last time I saw art change people was in The Weather Project (you remember Eliassons Sunset at the Tate) with people lolling on the floor. Amazing.

DARK, curated by Michaela Freeman, was as stylish as the little black dress she wore with ease and panache this evening. Here's what it can be: engaging, hypnotic, cleanly and stylishly executed. John Smiths' 'The Black Tower', 1984, was mystifying to me: eventually, he was talking about death. Spare - spartan - concise, lightly humorous, staring at things, bits of place, our minds are engaged in a preoccupation, while staring at what is in front of us with apparently no comprehension. Saddening, but the pragmatism and gentleness that constructs this narrative has that touch of humour: we are shown the colour of the sky, of his porridge, of the bits and pieces of his mechanics of his daily life, and his doppelganger in the form of a black building, the notion of death in the peripheral vision, now brought to the fore, into consciousness. In Ireland, we'd put that on the National Curriculum: it's all about growing up, finally realising the finity of self, the drawing together, the drawing in of the day.

And tomorrow, I'll go back. Josh Langan, less a flare and more a live wire buzzing with static (watch this space) - I couldn't see his work for the amount of bodies at this Private View, I couldn't get a seat in Susan Francis' installation, and I didn't get time to absorb Lemeh42's work. Here's to a success, here's to what it can be, here's to style. Bravo.