These seven paintings by Caroline Durré are haunted by the danger and attraction of opposites, explored in figures of tight knit complexity and subterranean anguish. Sited at the edge of modernity, amongst a scaffolding of industrial fragments, their bodies are naked and bereft, endowed with passions that divide them from each other while imprisoning them together in an architectural space of infinite projection and tragic consequences. Durré's vision is Baroque rather than Romantic and declares a cult of intellectually motivated dramatic excess rather than of emotional mood. The terror of the works reflects a psychological threshold bordering on both the sublime and the fearful.

Yet these figures react with positive muscular energy on stage sets which are half moonscape, half Platonic garden. For there is an exaggerated realisation of the pull of the earth's surface in her work; all these statues and figures have an increased weight and density as if gravity had been upgraded with new magnetic force. The earth is there in powerful detail, in cold almost crystalline shards of rock, in thick, grassed, felt-like soil, in sheared away rock faces of high cold mountains. Durré is fearless in combining such elements: naked figures and forbidding deserts, the industrial and the classical, distant perspective effects and lowly foreground details. Amidst the solidity of objects she introduces the extraterrestrial abstract glow of planets from outer space; Jupiter, the Sun and Neptune, studied from scientific photographs, hover like crystal balls on the shoulders of giant Atlas sculptures or miraculously above a stately pool.

The seven enigmas have the combination of provocation and inscrutability proper to an enigma; they can give only clues to far-reaching insights. The paintings form a series, of course, but the way in which they are connected is a puzzle and the puzzling becomes the important experience they impart. As a sequence they invite being read as a book. Visually, their saturated, isolated colours and finesse with chiaroscuro bring to mind illuminated manuscripts or the engraved book plates which Durré has studied. A literary element is undeniable in the symbols which are strewn across the landscapes, the theatrical scenarios, the narrative drive and the weight of historical reference. The story which connects them feels like an adventurous journey to exotic lands where terrifying but essential rites of passage are enacted. Teorema, which alludes to Pasolini's film of that name, depicts a female figure in a stance of ultimate protest or realisation, crying out in the centre of an hypnotic architectural space inscribed by classical columns.

Durre is committed to the bizarre, not only as a psychological weapon in Surrealist mode, but as a disruptive stage prop with a philosophical bent. It is a freak of nature, part crab, part scorpion, part spider, that sets off the chain of reactions in one of the Allegories. With a Poussin-like sense of fatal structure, the story passes from one figure to another; from the male figure injured or asleep (the ambiguity is clearly intended), to the fleeing woman, to the central protectress wielding a sword. Above the figures, steel structures, characteristic of Durré's style, soar forward in awesome perspective declaring the necessity of such primal battles.

The bird that preys on a man is another grotesquerie in a landscape which also declares another Durré obsession: symmetry. Two cypress trees and two female figures flank the scene of attack like saddened Michelangelo ignudi, their gestures and drapery in complex counterpoint. In the History of Twilight this dialectical impulse is taken up in a gallery of sculptures and two more ignudi in strict symmetrical contrapposto. Beyond the symmetry of space and objects is that of light; Durré seeks the moment of balance between day and night. One of the ultimate dialectics, that between the sexes, also has structural force in this world view but the balance is precarious. Women have the upper hand; Diana the huntress aims an arrow at a fleeing naked man while in another allegory, a giant woman, symbolising a life-giving river source, watches while the pathetic body of a man drops down a rocky ravine, a curling ribbon in her hand echoing the river flow, like a magic talisman with the power of life and death.

In earlier work Caroline Durré forged a significant aesthetic of space inhabited by industry. In these recent paintings she generates mythical reverberations within the modernist environment without a whiff of nostalgia. Only in a tough dialectic is there a chance for human action, for intervention in the terrible circumstances given to humans and the strange patterns woven by their stories.