ARTISTS TALKING

'Closer Still' is a collection of paintings by six artists who take photography as their source. Unlike photorealist responses, these works are shadows rather than reproductions, they take an impression from their photographic origins and remain as imprints. They communicate the difference between the painting and its source, intensifying the duration, ambiguity and intimacy of the process.

The selector, Beth Harland's contribution to the show is a series of three paintings derived from official documentation showing fragments of Florentine statues awaiting reconstruction after World War II bomb damage. Harland works from photocopies achieving a further removal from the original. Her images are high contrast and monochromatic; time seems to have burned, rather than faded them out. They refuse to be pinned down and I found my eyes straining to make out detail from the intricate pattern of light and dark. Their visual ambiguity contrasts with precise titles such as August 3rd 1944: Winter forming, perhaps, a kind of anti-documentation that uncovers the uncertainty of the historical moment.

Opposite Harland's fragmented pieces Simon Morley's Book Paintings seemed increasingly monolithic. Morley has recreated the frontispieces of the books which have informed his thinking, enlarging them to over six feet high. The hand-painted text is only just discernible on the dusty ochre and red monochrome grounds, seeming to float in and out of focus. The paintings felt intimidating, inaccessible – closed books. Like tablets of stone, they appeared ready to fall forward, crushing the viewer beneath their intellectual weight.

Most intriguing, are Louisa Minkin's copies of imperfections occurring on enlarged photocopies of an alchemical engraving of clouds. The swirling blotchy patterns of the Solve, Coagula series, become strangely reminiscent of their original source. Minkin uses the process of painting to alter the duration of the image, from a photocopy, completed in seconds, to her meticulous study of a detail. Her enlargements of the source do not serve to increase clarity, instead steering toward abstraction, the cell-like forms and alchemical beginnings remind us how any extreme close up seems to reveal the same hidden structure.

John Dughill also uses enlargement to focus on otherwise forgotten details of a photograph, slowing down, forcing us to pay more attention. However, it is difficult to understand his selection of details, why he feels a particular area is worthy of further consideration. Unlike Minkin, his forms are more figurative allowing us to pick out features: people, ships, waves. His work becomes more interesting when the content is made ambiguous. In Flash he depicts what could be an explosion, a trick of the light or simply the reflection of a camera flash, inverting the language of photography.

Andrew Grassie uses images downloaded from the NASA website to paint portraits of astronauts and cosmonauts. Two large-scale works are reminiscent of Holbien's classical portraiture, bearing the traditional symbols of power and epic, one subject holds a model of the space shuttle while the other is flanked by US and USSR flags. Although each painting bears the subject's name as title, they maintain a strange anonymity. More intimate are Grassie's smaller portraits – the dimensions of a family snap shot – yet here again the uniform head gear of the cosmonauts render the smiling Russians analogous.

I found the work of Rita Donagh, made in the 1970s and 80s perhaps the most difficult to connect with. Reproducing images of the infamous H-blocks in Northern Ireland, together with historically loaded lines of territory, Donagh has created a series of mixed-media works. Comprehension of these pieces seems rooted in an understanding of the troubles, made increasingly difficult by the shifting events in the province, including the recent closure of the H-blocks, turning these images into historical documents themselves.

Collectively this show causes a re-evaluation of the painting process. It demonstrates painting's ability to move beyond the photographic moment and capture the ambiguity present in every image, perhaps taking us closer to a truer picture.