Geoffrey de Groen: 'The speechless image'

It isn't easy for me to talk about the work of Geoffrey de Groen, for a number of quite specific reasons. Firstly, it isn't easy because the pictures don't need any words at all. Secondly, the words that might come into my mind to say have already been said by Paul McGillick in an eloquent essay that accompanied the book of Geoffrey's paintings published in 20012, and have been said by Wally Caruana in his concise essay in the catalogue of the current exhibition, Images from the cage of time: the paintings and drawings of Geoffrey de Groen. Both writers pick up on what viewers of this latest exhibition will have picked up on - the artist's love of ambiguity - that has been a constant in all of his paintings and drawings. There are ambiguities of shape, of tone, of surface, of recession and of form. As we apply reason to our investigation of these pictures - never the best way to approach pictures, admittedly - they become elusive and playful. Everything shifts, collapses, needs to be rebuilt.