Nick Goss, Josh Lilley Gallery, London

"Green Lanes" is the title of Nick Goss's latest elusive, ambivalent, meditative, opulent, defiantly estranging paintings on fragile linen. Although it sounds pastoral, "Green Lanes" is an unglamorous thoroughfare of retail parades and housing estates in northeast London where Goss, 34, occupies a studio. Based on his own photographs, the series focuses on the old-fashioned Turkish cafes, barbers' shops and men's social clubs lining the street. Its deeper themes are existential: questioning the knowability of the other, and painting's ability to carry the weight of truth.

In long, willowy, downward-coursing compositions in pale pinks and greens, bleached browns and occasional notes of blue, Goss evokes, through beaded screens of wispy paint, doorways into these unfamiliar interiors, as if peering in from the street. We discern domino tables, dusty national flags, birdcages, fading football posters, framed photographs, all dislocated and mixed up. In "Beechwood Bureau II", curving furniture indicates a room's receding depth, but a chequered linoleum floor appears upended and a juniper-green travel poster pushes forward a rear wall. An easy chair in "Cardinal" carves out provisional perspectival space, but its fabric reassembles into a puzzle of lines and shapes. A coat hanger morphs into flowers in "Bloom"; walls float free in "Canary" and "Tiles".

Potted plants and caged birds are everywhere, exotic in "Toucan", lyrical in "Rose Ringed", resting fantastically on the ghost of a table in "Pictures do the Talking", and always implying delicious fakery.

So Goss invites us to enter his world but holds us at bay, as figurative remnants verge towards disappearance in near-abstract collisions of planes, patterns, solid and spectral forms. It is a masterly act of painterly improvisation, graceful yet psychologically unsettling, by one of the UK's most exciting young artists.

joshlilley.com, 020 7580 5677, to June 5

Photograph: Nick Goss/Josh Lilley Gallery

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