D J Roberts’ new paintings investigate further his fascination with enigmatic places that refuse to give up their secrets and where something always seems hidden.

Empty modernist rooms, rows of prefabs, the road out of town – why should places that hardly seem worth a second glance possess such psychological hitting power?

Memory must have something to do with it. For most of us environments like these form the background to our lives so it is hardly surprising that they start to mean things to us in all sorts of oblique and mystifying ways.

The cinema is important too. Certain types of environment have become so familiar through film that maybe under the right circumstances even the most featureless flyover or inner city shopping mall can assume the wasteland glamour of film noir.

The paintings are not highly finished. Like storyboards, like snapshots, they are offhand and done quickly. Some are of real places, some worked up from memory or imagination, some reference magazine images or other peoples’ artwork. The human figure is never present.

They seem to form part of some bigger narrative but one that it is never possible to understand.