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In Red Coat the right-hand edge of the canvas slices through an eye and cuts off the lips, but what intensity this confers, what focus!These paintings are reminiscent of the snaps in a photo album, a gauge of their accessibility rather than the distancing expected of high art. Yet Katz also makes these devices serve his purpose to make fine art: he holds down large areas of colour and vivifies them unexpectedly. He draws on the mass media images of consumerism, particularly the billboard and hoarding. From these sources come the flat areas of largely unmodulated strong colour, and the severe cropping of the image which distinguish his work.

It's a kind of formalisation: rhythms are more important than the signs of evident brush-strokes This is "optical" painting, but of a generalised kind. Katz portrays strictly what is seen, not what is felt or otherwise hidden from view He does it boldly, aiming for an in-your-face directness. Make of it what you will.Katz makes paintings of heroic scale which are near-naive in their apparent lack of inflection and subtlety Details are subjugated to the overall effect. A double portrait in different positions, it raises the issue of identity - of twin or doppelganger, of your other half existing somewhere in the world. Katz admits to being fascinated in the early 1950s by the work of Piero della Francesca. Certainly some of the calm organisation of flat, yet realistic shapes, so typical of della Francesca, can be discerned in Katz' work. He also, perhaps surprisingly, talks of the influence of Pollock, Rothko and Kline.

They apparently brought him to the painters of the Baroque such as Tintoretto, Rubens, Veronese.Katz is nothing if not eclectic in his art historical references. Of course, the Baroque style was chiefly characterised by movement, and most of Katz' paintings are notable for their stillness, the figures frozen, the moment arrested. If the vision is ostensibly fantasy-prone, it's also strangely empty. The stylisation somehow allows Katz an abdication of commentary: the meaning is as flat as the image. Katz often paints his wife Ada, as he does here, though more to glamourise her than highlight the domestic virtues.

It makes high art references, in particular to Rodin's Thinker, and it features the same woman twice. However, the recent paintings of blossom, or foliage in a wood, all vertiginous movement, do refer back to this earlier interest.The Red Band is typical of several Katz strategies. These images remain two-dimensional because they are what they are - images: painted copies of people. There's a piquant honesty here, as well as a nod towards post-modernism.There is a wealth of thought and art history underpinning these paintings. That's how it is." On the other hand, he is prepared to look at what he does in purely formal terms. In a recent interview, he identified his subject matter singly as "the outside light".Katz does have a tendency to repeat the same figure in the same painting.

Much like a film director, he is going for different takes within a single picture space. He likes doubling up.Another spin on this is his habit of showing one of his own pictures, or part of one, within another painting. You might expect these static figures to have a classical weight and solidity, yet they are curiously two-dimensional.If Katz' figures resemble cardboard cut-outs it's because he does not aspire to serenity or ideal beauty - he is not making ordinary people into mythic beings. Katz occasionally paints the nude for instance, but the results are never exhibited.