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David Noonan's deeply private yet richly communicative pictures - made in the last few years from silkscreen prints on jute and linen, or gouache and paper collages - imply, despite their stillness, an animated world of richly expressive possibilities. Preferring to leave the meaning of his work loose, most of the artist's pictures are untitled. In the last few years, many of the images he employs were sourced from books about art education from various countries around the world. Their message of freedom through creativity is often reflected in a specific design aesthetic - a clean minimalism inflected with hallucinatory explosions of figuration.

In recent shows, Noonan has carpeted the gallery floor with a rough sisal rug that unifies the space while suggesting a sense of an environment outside the gallery; someone's home or theatre; a field on which the scenarios in the show may have occurred (the horizon line in many of Noonan's pictures allude to a stage, even when the theatre is not explicit). In Noonan's show 'MARKUS' at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, the rug emphasised the strong narrative and formal links between the images; of private rituals in public spaces. The title could refer to any of the draped characters in the show, an unknowable drama in which characters wordlessly sleep, play and invent themselves...

The image shifts again: to a head, covered in a grid that somehow seems more than a mask. The body below is a black mass; the atmosphere is chilling. There is more than a hint of violence here, but without supporting information, this violence, or the identity of the person wearing the mask, will never be known (sometimes, though, in a world so full of brutal convictions, an image that allows some slippage in certainty can offer more comfort than a dossier full of facts). Another image: a man with an umbrella, his face hidden, the smooth skin of his torso indicating he has only recently left childhood behind. He is wearing strange trousers, although perhaps 'trousers' is the wrong word - they look like fur, or strangely sturdy cloth, covered partly with embroidery. (What would a centaur wear? Why does this question occur to me?)

It is impossible to know who these people are; what they are hiding, or whom they are hiding from. Yet, for all their drama and sheer vividness, the pictures are silent. But, like many early films, there is so much going on, so many layers of action and innuendo, that their silence is almost surprising; yet a faint hum of music never seems far away...

Each show Noonan makes is built on associations, and the architecture and personality of each space he hangs his work in. Narratives flow around the walls; images react to each other. Chance, intuition and free-association are the life-blood of these pictures. They reiterate the impossibility of reducing the description of a personality, a life, to one line, one reflection, one feeling...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2008 issue.