ANTWERP.- For many years, Jon Thompson has been profoundly affected by the written and recorded work of the great Canadian pianist and theorist, Glenn Gould. He draws many parallels between Gould's approach and his own or, more precisely, Gould's understanding of musical expression and his own understanding of the business of painting.

Colour, mood, atmosphere, sense of place - these are the flesh, blood and bones of Thompson's remarkable paintings.

"Gould's idea of repetition through translation - the building of an imaginal entity capable of taking passage from the inside to the outside followed by the translation of mental 'stuff', 'the music itself', into a perceivable form, is not one unfamiliar to painters' Colour, mood, atmosphere, sense of place are all factors which come to exist in my mind's eye in an utterly compelling and extremely precise form."

Ben Ravenscroft makes compelling paintings, which behind their spontaneity, reveal multiple levels of premeditation and intention, intuition and deliberation. Ravenscroft systematically places bands of colour in order to retrace the brush marks of the primed surface, both embellishing and disrupting the original function.

The paintings of Andrew Graves sit at the edge of what is recognisable, yet at the moment when revelation seems imminent they shift and blur. They contain a promise that at some point, soon, their nature will become clear, their meaning unfolded.

Andrew Bick's multi-layered paintings use various shapes in free and geometric abstraction. They are executed in a combination of oil paint, marker pen, wax, acrylic paint and perspex and play with opposites such as transparency and opaqueness, depth and surface, line and plane, colour and non-colour, glossy and matt surfaces.