Visual art: Signs of the times

Billy Leahy on Lars Arrhenius' entertaining show in Temple Bar

Lars Arrhenius: If Signs Had Souls. Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, 5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin 2. 01 671 0073, www.templebargallery.com until 2 September

Throngs of visitors are currently swarming the Temple Bar Gallery on a daily basis. Unsurprising given the current exhibition by Stockholm artist Lars Arrhenius. If Signs had Souls is a fantastically entertaining and amusing show, and is instantly accessible. Thanks to a strong Scandinavian sense of humour, reminiscent of an Aki Kaurismäki movie, and the use of universally recognisable instruction manual characters and stick figures straight from a 'Children at Play' sign as protagonists, Arrhenius' work is approachable and engaging.

Arrhenius is part social cartologist, part voyeur of the anonymous urban life, creating maps not of the physical geographic environment, but of the day-to-day shared complexities and nuances of the post-industrial city. The 2002 work 'A-Z', for instance, uses the famous London road book as a backdrop for linear storylines, which detail events in the lives of 18 characters. While the streets of London twist below, accurately depicting geographical and physical reality, the inhabitants of Arrhenius's spherical illustrations go about their incident-filled lives with randomness and coincidence never far away. Arrhenius, it would seem, is a cartographer of the lives we lead rather than the physical roads we follow.

In the eight-minute DVD piece 'The Street', Arrhenius again focuses on the urban space, allowing us to see into the apartments, offices and lives of individuals that inhabit a fairly standard cross-section of the city environment. The looped animation, brilliantly hung by the TBG, shows the inner workings of a contemporary city, with absurdity, chaos and randomness all organised within the standard-sized cells that represent rooms, be they in a hospital, gym, school or apartment. The repetition and often mundane nature of modern existence also come to the fore in this work, while elsewhere this is merely alluded to.

The modular urban space that is the apartment again comes under scrutiny in 'Habitat', with various scenarios that take place in adjoining homes – including chores, sex and attempted suicide – all documented with an acute dose of humour and irony. The life of a single man, purportedly the artist's father, is documented in 'The Man Without Qualities'. Here Arrhenius has mounted 141 prints – the arrangement resembles a bizarre board game – taking us through the main events in one person's life. Once more the language of his pictograms is uncomplicated; but this element, as well as making the work quite accessible, allows the underlying philosophical themes to be examined without obstruction.

In a manner similar to the London A-Z, Arrhenius' narratives clearly have no definite start or endpoint and extend beyond the stories illustrated in If Signs had Souls. Ideas of randomness and chance play crucial roles across the works, balancing and interacting with scenarios driven by cause and effect to create believable, life-like situations. Everything from small tragedies to happy coincidences, dancing to death are detailed; events people have known, come across and can relate to. And if that does not explain the exhibition's popularity, perhaps it is just that the signs are good.