Vanishing Point: An Exhibition Of Post-traumatic Images by Paul Wilks, King’s Manor, Exhibition Square, York August 29 to September 22

Look at them for long enough, and shapes and forms seem on the point of resolving themselves, before slipping away once again.

Paul calls them his "post-traumatic images", and there is a good reason for that.

The artist, who grew up in York and trained at York School of Art, was savagely beaten after confronting burglars at his London home in 2001. The assault lasted for nearly an hour, and was described by police later as "terrible".

The artist doesn't go into detail about the injuries he sustained - but the attack left his perceptions "scrambled into incoherence".

For months, he fought to "reassemble a normality' from within the crazy-house of my mental environment". He found it hard to shake the conviction that the world around him and the life he was leading were unreal - simply a "mental escape" from a beating that was still going on. At any moment, he expected to receive the "final kick to the head and all would be over".

Now thankfully much recovered, he has returned to painting. The works on show in the senior common room at King's Manor in York's Exhibition Square from Tuesday were an attempt to capture the feeling of unreality and disjointedness he experienced following the attack.

"If they depict the condition with any accuracy they portray something of the damaged perceptive mechanisms which one normally looks beyond'," he says.

Stephen Lewis