COLOGNE.- It is a strange world conjured in the recent paintings of Gerard Hemsworth. Strange, and yet familiar. Awkward, and yet utterly at ease. The monochrome and the architecture of the grid remain as a lingering spectre of Modernist essentialist painting. Yet the shallow spaces that these finely managed colour areas excavate have been populated by cartoon rocks, grasses and cacti.

Are these landscapes barren deserts or minutely tended botanic gardens? And, what is the difference in an age of easy travel and exotic day-tripping? Both terrains seem equally viable for the chequered picnic blanket to be unfolded onto.

And, who is doing the picnicking? Have the visitors momentarily departed the scene, or are these anthropomorphic cacti our prickly proxies, or is this an absurd unwitnessed place where the succulents themselves sally forth on their own beanos?

As these possible narratives continue to coalesce and contradict, it is back to the 20th century paintings that parenthesise high Modernism that these new works playfully return. The kooky aerial Cornish harbours of Ben Nicholson seem rendered here in the enclosing rock forms; the mute mannequins of de Chirico's empty town squares reappear as latter day vegetative Madonna-and-Childs; even the edge-articulating pours of Morris Louis are brought to mind in the taller, spindlier specimens.

These paintings seem to ask how and why, with the lightest of touch, with the oddest of means and signs, are we lulled into constructing the silliest of scenes. Meaning - if it's okay to presume that such a thing is still pursued in painting - is not to be found here in the decoding of semiotic ciphers. Meaning instead crystallises in the revelation that looking and reading are playful and disquieting actions. Reward is not achieved in the solving of a problem or in the punchline to a joke, reward is found in the hovering state of not-knowing.

Hemsworth is able to make the elegant appear ridiculous and the ridiculous, elegant. This exhibition constitutes an outing, but, like Bob Dylan's Bear Mountain Picnic, there are no bears or mountains. There will however be a picnic.

Gerard Hemsworth studied at St Martin’s School of Art in London in the mid 60’s and has exhibited internationally since the 70’s. An influential artist and teacher, Hemsworth was until recently the Professor of Fine Art and the Director of the Master’s Programme in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2000 he won the Charles Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy of Art London. He lives and works in East Sussex, England.