David Cobley's recent pictures of figures sitting or reclining on beds use the microcosm of the dark, artificially lit studio interiors to create the aura of a womb-like presence. With its subject, a pair of nude figures, one male, one female, its colour rationalised along tonal rather than chromatic lines, and the square or off-square format, there is a neutrality that gives these works that particular kind of strength that comes with balance. Cobley's studious and indeed contemplated compositions dispense with the merely meretricious or superficially decorative.

Within the conventional parameters of mimetic or representational painting Cobley makes cryptic or oblique references to, or skits on, style. These humourous 'takes' on historical or contemporary style are symptomatic of an enviable virtuosity as well as a confession of his own isolation and chosen limitations. The emotively titled 'On the Edge', with its vertiginous psychological implications of a cliffhanger, reveals in fact the anticlimatic and melodramatic image of a reclining nude precariously positioned on the edge of a bed. The bed is a constant feature, functioning not only formally as a dais, plinth or stage on which the figure is presented, but as a symbolic object replete with social or psychological associations to do with birth, illness, death and a place where we spend as much as a third of our lives.

It is tempting to see these exquisitely crafted images as representing the artist having fun, letting down his proverbial hair following his many and renowned portrait commissions. But far from being ancillary works using left-over paint from a royal or VIP commission, they are central to his main artistic interests. The platonic intimacy of these situations allows Cobley to visually and psychologically probe the mysteries of appearance without the distraction of 'outside' natural or cultural influences. As its title suggests, 'Shaft of Light' records one of these few intrusions of sharp daylight, in terms of an uneven titanium ribbon, disrupting the expanse of taut cotton sheets.

Cobley's symbolism is therefore discrete and implicit. Perhaps in terms of its metaphysical dimension, its silence, balance and pantheistic accord between the self and its surroundings, his art has much in common with Edward Hopper. Yet Cobley's are not stills from implied narrative, but stills from observations of an intense and temporally extended kind.