"These are pictures to live with, to enjoy, and endlessly to explore. This is what real painting is about." Robin Simon

Reuben Colley is a real painter. He is also a painter evolving before our very eyes. He has the crucial eye for an image, without which any amount of technique is worthless; a sponge like capacity to absorb the lessons of other artists and from his own experience (and at an astonishing rate); and a natural gift for composition.

Already, within the space of just a few years he has moved on from the Hopper inspired cityscapes that he first showed, through more subtle responses to his native Birmingham and London exploring the darker side of the city, a tradition that reaches back to Dore and Whistler and runs though Monet and Sickert to Kossoff and Auerbach. Here are frankly gritty, uncompromising, unblinkered explorations of the elusive glamour that characterises the city in rain, fog and dusk, often in the twilit zones of back street garages abandoned power stations, and beside the railway tracks. Yet the paintings are anything but gloomy; atmospheric, yes, and exquisitely painted.

The flickering light effects, a sensitive paint surface of half tones, are dramatised by fleeting moments of colour, all the more powerful in their effect for being so sparingly deployed.

Paintings of thus kind, full of quality and technically so sound, can be 'laid down', as it were, like an excellent vintage. Like well-made wine, Colley's canvases will only improve with age: the structure is there, the balance, the blend, ready for appreciation now, but improving with age and deeper acquaintance. These are pictures to live with, to enjoy, and endlessly to explore. This is what real painting is about. These are not trivial works, offering flashy frisson of a smart gimmick, or a sensation which is over as soon as felt, the visual equivalent of a smart remark.

Paintings of this depth, while easy enough on the eye, offer up their secrets slowly, in the course of prolonged contemplation or; best of all, with the long familiarity of daily companionship.

The great Eighteenth Century landscape painter Richard Wilson used to prevent his pupils from using colour for at least a year: He insisted that they should first learn how to construct a picture using tonal values alone, which remains, ultimately, the basis of all successful painting. Colley seems always to have understood this crucial lesson. If his earlier paintings indulged in local colour to a degree that could prove a little destabilizing, he is now rigorously on track, and is hugely rewarding to look at these present pictures for the sheer toughness of mind that they display, in addition to their more obvious attractions. Unusually for a young painter, he has always been comfortable working on a large scale, and he handles it with great assurance.

There is a real pleasure in trying to identify those artists who, through Colley's evident process of looking and studying have made an impression on his way of painting. I have mentioned Hopper, but now, whether the result of direct influence or not, there are echoes of Kossoff and even Turner. None the less, the pictures are distinctly Colley's own and - an important point - these canvases reveal that he is as interested in the process of painting as in the subjects he depicts. Again, this is a characteristic of what I have been calling real painting.

Reuben Colley's paintings are serious but far from solemn; indeed, they are full of a sense of wonder; even of joy, at the very act of artistic creation. They are the real thing.

ROBIN SIMON

Editor, The British Art Journal