Deborah Poynton's paintings are disturbing in their insistence on being looked at. A day could easily be devoted to looking at each work. However, they make demands not only in terms of time but also what one has to relinquish in order to be fully immersed in them. The paintings should be viewed cinematographically, but on closer viewing it becomes apparent that every part of the painted surface refers back to the entirety. One needs to stand back to grasp an outline of the imagery, but one is simultaneously drawn close to the canvas to examine the brushstrokes. These are compositions in the strictest sense, which make life in all its constructedness their subject.

In Poynton's paintings, a pervasive sense of isolation and solitude denies entry to the viewer. The desire to be deeply submerged in the imagery, and to flirt with it, is constantly frustrated and rebuffed, and one is literally left standing outside the action. The longer the paintings are looked at, the more the viewer is subjected to this push and pull sensation.

The paintings serve simultaneously as mirrors and stages, and offer a passage through and into the world of the 'other' and the unknown, perhaps recalling the through-the-looking-glass journey of Alice in Wonderland. 'Where am I?' Not: 'who am I?' There are people to be seen, in ever-increasing multitudes. As viewer, one is also a face in the picture. The mood is vegetative and nervy, and most alive. The imagery is not comforting and betrays our need for consolation. Everything is so realistic that it appears unreal.

Poynton's imagery is so close to the romantic and the surreal that her paintings do not work as romantic or surreal images. They have no overt symbolic meaning. They are ethical in that they do not encourage any moral directives. They appear to assume a postmodern, deconstructionist stance, albeit without the usual witticisms or grandeur. They affirm Jacques Derrida's assertion that only painting can radically uncover truth. This is an art that speaks directly from itself, executed 'on a knife's edge', so to speak.

Perhaps the most disturbing painting in this series is Betrayal. It has to be a triptych, in the religious tradition of the altarpiece. The trinity is substantiated by the subjects. In the left panel is a glowing turquoise dustbin. It is empty, and reads as a black hole. This form is repeated in the round turquoise picnic table; behind it, on the right, a man - the traitor, shall we say - is seated on a stool. In the front of the table are two stools; one wonders who should be seated on them.

The altarpiece is merciless. A naked woman, lit from within, is 'beheaded' by a man's head. Upside down, she defines the holy centre of the image. The woman, the holy enigma, surrounded by a crowd of people, is taken, gripped prone by the powerful arm of a man. Who is he? She is flaunted, misused, mocked, and perhaps overlooked in her desire for clemency and redemption. If there were to be a female Christ, she could be this woman. Interestingly, the man at top right closely resembles the figure of Christ. The blonde woman in the top left is in a key position in the composition. She gazes out at the viewer, brazenly, to dissociate herself from the centrally placed woman whose fate could just as well have been hers. The two women could have been sitting on the two stools to the right. The 'betrayer' may have played them off against each other. This is, after all, a man revealing himself as a gaze into a mirror, a gaze that reflects nothing and which remains a mirror. Because of him, the figure of Christ in the centre of the painting remains a prophecy of doom.

The heads, the clothes, the areas of skin, the plants, the rocks, the trees, the moss are stratified into a huge imaginary triangle, which is centred in the real triangle of the woman's pubic hair. This whole ensemble is set up against a wide seascape, providing a contrast to the abundance of the visible, and wagers the life and death of the viewer against its own boundlessness.

The painting The Keeper, although in an entirely different format, relates closely to Betrayal. The standing man is the same person to be seen in the right-hand panel of the latter image. This aging man - entirely naked and entirely physical - is in the pose of a thinker reflecting on his own doubts. Protected by a walled cage, he may be fantasising about the futility of desires, the impossibility of their fulfilment. 'Whatever I have been managing in my life has slipped through my fingers,' the keeper could be thinking to himself. 'Have I stayed true to myself in my life?' Implicit in the imagery is the lingering question of who could be seated on the chair. Perhaps someone whom the keeper has let go of too soon because he feared responsibility and the unpredictable. On the floor lie the remains of the past: car keys, an empty Coke bottle, a folding ruler, a medicine packet, a pair of glasses, a roll of masking tape, the wallet, a plant slip, the suit jacket. One empty chair is left over. The man is entirely turned away from it. Perhaps the letting go of the life represented here would have offered another, final chance, which is why the man is assuming the pose of a thinker, captured against a dark night sky.

The diptych For Ever and Ever is the most secular of the series. In it we see a great crowd with about thirty people in a wide foreground, and the mass in the right background. The people are lingering; they may be in a government building or in a huge church or endless club. They are united by an aloofness, a search for something bigger, an addiction, an intoxication, and an impotence and inability to fulfil their longings and yearnings. The black and white photos, inexplicably floating in the left-hand side of the right panel, are small 'side effects' which emphasise the loneliness in the painting: a child soldier who has seen too much, or the maiden in Death and the Maiden, drawn to what she fears. This painting is a visual Much Ado about Nothing of our time. A prophetic figure holds a landscape in his right hand, in his left is money, as though the trade in these circumstances has come to nothing. An image of the soldier-father floats above the head of a beautiful woman; her inward expression makes the notion of immaculate conception appear new and relevant to our time.

On first looking at the diptych Safety and Security the question that immediately arises is why are so many people gathered together in one place? The themes of the painting surely revolve around the powers of a police state, the longing for God (the red sky perhaps in remembrance of social realism?), and the strong horizontal as an equalisation of people. The couple on the far right of the right-hand panel appear to have earned their peace. The naked woman in the middle has stepped out from the image and makes the scene behind her into a picture within a picture. If I were young enough and a girl, I would be her… Poynton's imagery so often leads the viewer back to him or herself.

This happens most forcefully in the triptych Surrender. The middle panel, taking up about half of the huge format, is filled with the man whom we have already encountered in Betrayal and The Keeper. He lies there, once again completely naked, in a pose that, although compositionally lucid, remains enigmatic. Is he in the process of consciously dying? Is he having a vision? Facing enlightenment? Or is he used up, after the 'climax' of his life? And why is he so alone, so solitary? Or is this solitude as the ultimate happiness? He lies on the objects of a subordinated life: an art magazine, a belt, tissues, a little box of keepsakes, a photo (his mother?), a hole punch, a tie, a ballpoint pen, a drinking glass, an egg-timer, a wire hanger, a spoon, an envelope of photos, a 'radiant' car advertisement, an unopened condom, far left a CD, on it a used tissue; all these things in their enumeration sound like a poem; they are simply the man's 'other side.' Above the man the 'habitation' continues, the 'habituation' to life, the ordinariness, the 'co-habitation'. On the left-hand side the garden view, a long forsaken world. Everything is pieced together, a composite approach. In the left side panel are plastic and aluminium window frames, the view into the garden like a glimpse into a primeval forest, the exotic flowered curtain, autumnal magic flowers, green, violet, the white lily in the middle, almost alive, the complement to the penis in the centre of the middle panel. In the right panel is the dark folding of the door frame, and the oddly misguided view into the primeval garden, as if it had already been wholly internalised. Again a section of curtain, this time in pink and yellow-green folds: all these boundaries frame a question. Where is the moment of ecstasy? The answer is to be found in the man's face: 'I see and in the same moment I relinquish myself'.

It is bizarre to look for words for what can only be seen in paintings. Deborah Poynton is a medium through which painting speaks.

Peter Rech is a renowned art therapist, and professor of art education at the University of Cologne, Germany.