Nevan Lahart’s A Lively Start to a Dead End is currently on show at the RHA Gallery 1. It is a large, wild installation that dominates the entire gallery space. He sent a non-press release to publicise the show: it contains none of the formulaic art-speak that accompanies many contemporary Irish art exhibitions. He even lists things you will not find in his exhibition: “understanding, meaning or a new lifestyle choice.”

Upon entering the gallery you are confronted by a hearse, made of refuse sacks, with a large dent in its side. The hearse sits alongside a packing-tape-and-cardboard sculpture of a headless, upturned horse; both of these are outside a large structure called the Church of Naivety.

Other things outside the church include a crazed papier-mâché-and-timber sculpture of a man/automaton rewriting a skewed version of Josef Beuys’s doctrine on a blackboard. Beside him sits a scaled-down modernist house, made of foam board and perspex – it is full of cornflakes.

To the rear corner of the gallery, a large, deformed, puss coloured, Sponge-Bob-type tumour stands, giving everyone the thumbs up. It is arresting and very amusing.

Inside the Church of Naivety, a small hut has been built. Around it are strewn things like: a crutch with a brush on the end of it, a number of empty milk cartons strung together with twine, a ream of canvases tied together. A cardboard photocopier punts out copies of ten, three, and one euro notes.

One wall of the church houses a number of Lahart’s paintings with subject matter ranging from a skip filled with coffins to a street lamp, with knowingly absurd and pithy titles like Bury Me with My Playstation and Ghandi Re-incarnated as a Streetlamp.

There is a keen knowledge of art history in this work, but it looks too much like work shown in the Palais du Tokyo in 2002 – which gives the work a jaded, dated feel, at odds with the edginess a non-press release implies.

Two walls of the church are made of massive, transparent sheets of tarpaulin, which are drawn onto with marker pen. The drawings are technically excellent. One of the drawings features Rembrandt, young and old. Another image features Mary Harney making some comment about the PPP, and Bertie Ahern performing seppuku.

One image features a collection of priests holding infants on their laps. The priests are a sinister bunch issuing cartoon-word truisms and excuses. It is a large, clunking, pseudo-political cartoon. The idea that this show is one massive snub to “the authorities” (be they authorities in art, politics, culture, et cetera) is utterly clear – too clear – and this piece extols a fashionable stance on a topic far more inherently shocking than the image itself.

It seems the only reason for its place in the church is to house a pun on the word “sincerely” – which seems self-congratulatory and suffocating.

Amid this calculated, howling gale of images and grit, there seems to be a fabricated, lone, voice of reason trying to break through. But it cannot – because it only knows how to utter the most prosaic and obvious of things.

There is no doubt as to the considerable physical rigour displayed in this work, this massive self-portrait. There are also some belly laughs to be had. As a disruption of the white cube space, physically, it works well and as a disruption to a sort of state of control, it also works well, conceptually.

However, there seems to be a sort of competent, anarchy-by-numbers feel to it all, which has the accidental effect of unsettling the viewer.

A Lively Start to a Dead End runs until February 27.

-Adrian Duncan