Nathalie du Pasquier's recent still-life paintings are realistic representations of ordinary, inanimate objects on a tabletop, placed in the controlled light of a studio interior. As such, these works abide by time-honoured conventions of the genre of painting she has made her own. Fruit, flowers and comestibles traditional in still lifes are, however, conspicuous by their absence, although one picture appears to show two cut tulip stems. Instead, the subject matter of these pictures comprises a range of everyday fabricated vessels of different forms and colours; there is the occasional appearance of studio utensils, such as an ink roller, a stone in one work, and items of glassware are recurrent motifs.

 Although some of the unlabelled containers in the pictures are rather enigmatic in themselves, generally the pictures display recognisable motifs which are staged and framed in unfamiliar ways. In many of the paintings, small objects are depicted larger than life in large-scale canvases, often crowding a reduced pictorial field and viewed from very close quarters. These strategies endow familiar objects with a looming, monumental presence. Compositions are not self-contained within the pictorial fields of some paintings and a cropping of elements means that these appear in a fragmentary form, especially in the smaller works. Space in these works is a symbolic construction, composed of a white ground and a light, blank background, and sometimes objects are depicted from an unusually high viewpoint, on an upwardly tilting ground with a high horizon line formed by the back edge of the table. The laws of perspective are occasionally flouted in drawing the elipses of vessels, and the artist appears fascinated by the distortions of objects viewed through glass.

 These still-life arrangements are made up of rather plain, functional manufactured objects; only a blue and white ornamental vase is a reminder of a decorative tendency present in the artist's earlier works. It appears then that these objects have been chosen not for their intrinsic aesthetic qualities, but to fulfil this artist's particular vision. In the paintings, contrived arrangements of simple objects are the source of pictorial complexity and, on an abstract level, provide the painter with an endless range of variations of interesting shapes and forms to represent. The artist's interest, and our own, is excited by the formal interplay afforded by these elements in the paintings. In many pictures the artist also dwells on the duality of solid and void, and the interior and exterior surfaces of objects; even a stone in one of the works is punctured with holes and it is not surprising that glassware should appear in almost all of the paintings.

 The objects have evidently been studied from the life and the paintings appear to be the result of observation and description, the values traditionally regarded as the rationale of still-life painting. The use of cropping in some of the compositions increases the impression of the artist having homed in on objects to observe them closely. A real interest is shown in recording optical phenomena and there is a certain delight in the ambiguity which is discovered through attentive looking, such as the play of light and shadow, fluctuations in perspectival cues and the distortions of forms through glass. Glassware is a motif which has intrigued still-life painters for centuries, being an emblem of their concern with the world of appearances, as well as testing their skills in representation.

 These are also still lifes in the modernist tradition, whose elements have been chosen as neutral vehicles for the act of painting itself, relatively free from extrapictorial concerns. The objects in the paintings are familiar to the artist - many are repeated in different pictures - but each time stimulate a fresh experience of painting for both artist and viewer. The subject matter of these still-life paintings is made up of mostly utilitarian objects of a modern consumer society, some of which are evidently made of plastic, that do not appear to have been chosen for their symbolism, nor any overt cultural values which they may carry across from their lives outside the pictures. Even if a green plastic funnel, for instance, did possess some personal, emotional connotations for the artist, this is not communicated to the viewer and the artefact is presented devoid of strong, predetermined associations. There is perhaps something enigmatic in the lack of detail and very blankness of these vessels and containers, and the apparent randomness of their juxtapositions. Although the element of water might be considered a underlying theme in this series of works, the artist appears rather indifferent to narratives that combinations of objects might suggest. Some of the juxtapositions are mildly surprising - there is a stone and a piece of electric cable in two of the pictures - but they have very little of the uncanny about them. A certain mystery perhaps resides in the fact that the artist finds such objects worthy of depiction for their own sake. Even this, however, is in keeping a genre in which common, inconsequential objects can become the subject of serious artistic interest and the scrutiny of viewer.

 The contemplative nature of the still-life painter's gaze is able to surprise, intrigue and mesmerize the viewer with the normally unperceived visual qualities of familiar objects, and things which in the world of lived experience are taken for granted, can be transfigured in paintings worthy of our admiration. Despite the traditional view of the still life as a copy of reality, these pictures interest us primarily as paintings. The artist prefers a straightforward representational style, in which careful attention is paid to the drawing and modelling of the objects, and the articulation of forms by means of controlled, methodical brushwork. In the cold, clear light of these pictures there is a rejection of inconstant atmospheric effects and a supression of the full sensual potential of the medium of oil paint. The artist presents the range of objects as pristine archetypes, with relatively generalised textures and mostly undecorated surfaces. These are painted with a reduced chromatic register, in muted, limpid colours, and a light key, in which tones of white predominate. Objects are illusionistically modelled in light and shade, with a careful gradation of tone of the local colour, while shadows appear unrealistically transparent and light. Although these are tactile paintings, populated by objects and vessels which are normally handled, a paradoxical consistency of surface treatment in these pictures is in marked contrast to the traditional efforts of still-life painters to appeal to the sense of touch by evoking the fullest possible range of particularised qualities of different material surfaces.

 These are Nathalie du Pasquier's most rigorous still-life paintings to date. The decorative aesthetic which predominated in earlier works, has given way to a greater austerity and artistic seriousness. The artist's precise articulation of line and volume, her carefully orchestrated compositional order and the analytical depth of her observation in paintings of great formal purity, free of extraneous detail and surface ornament, and purged of inessential colour, suggests that she may be entering a classical phase in her work