The exquisite haven that is the tiny Lolapoloza Gallery, in Blue Boar Street, has an intriguing selection of paintings on show by four emerging artists. Tastes Like Paint is the sensual title of their exhibition and reflects the passionate involvement with their subject that these young artists display in their work. They all in their own way are preoccupied with the question of what painting is, and what it can be and are testing that in their application of the stuff itself.

The selection of the works, made by Artisjustaword organiser Claude Barbe-Brown, is presumably driven by this common sense of enquiry and so it can be regarded as the theme of the exhibition. Two intense colour works by Angus Wolf plunge one into pondering the idea of the painting process as subject itself. Vivid and discordant, they are traces of industrial landscapes dragged from the artist's unconscious and described with a nightmarish palette that are not meant to be easy on the eye or soothing to the mind. This is serious stuff.

A cooler look at landscape, but no less obsessive in its way, is the work of Grant Doyle. Here the power of nature is both alluded to and strictly confined in cerebral works that use linear grid structures, relief and a restraint in the use of the paint as a metaphor for our investigation into the natural world and our futile attempts to contain it. Jill Doherty adds a twist of surrealism to her probing of the naturalistic in a series of ethereal and distinctly uneasy works that have a skeletal figure contorted and writhing, suspended in fields of soupy colour or agitated scratch marks and which allude to unnerving states of mind such as sleep paralysis.

Most fun, perhaps, is Jennifer Brown whose The Duchess of Whateverthef is both familiar and refreshing in her newness. A portrait of a finely dressed young woman in the manner of Velasquez, she also sports funky shades and an attitude to match. Contrasting historical portraiture with trash culture Brown asks that we consider the social role of art and the value of the objects it produces.

These are beginnings for sure, but evidence of serious attention given by young painters to the tradition within which they exist and their search for a new ground that they can occupy as professional artists. This is not 'in yer face' work, as is often proposed by the youthful, but a thought-provoking little exhibition that is well worth spending time with. It runs until May 4.