Teaching him at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Colin McCahon noticed that Richard Killeen’s compositions seemed assembled from separate parts, like jigsaw puzzle pieces. This one even takes its title from the three significant features in it, and orders them in a descending hierarchy of importance. Richard’s subject matter is both realistic and abstract, and his work allows a reading of both modes. Yet if painting in the Realist tradition was once considered a window onto the world, Richard is showing in this work that the opening is now closed. His stylised figure has become a flattened shape pasted over the background, casting little shadow. Is the Realist mode just the alibi for the investigation of figure and field with image and pattern, or does narrative linger on?

Richard’s simple colours and representation of the banality of everyday life relate to American Pop Art, but his composition also responds to local traditions of Realism. He retrieves Regionalism from the Canterbury hinterland and dishes it up in Epsom. The man wears the businessman’s burqa: his drab suit jacket, pale shirt with cufflinks and slightly askew dark red neck tie mark him out as a professional. But what is a city slicker like him doing loitering with intent outside a house in broad daylight? Why isn’t he at the office where he belongs, instead of being at home, disrupting gender role stereotyping? His short-back-and-sides Brylcreemed haircut denotes a conservative conformist rather than a rebel. Crossing his arms protectively across his body to mark out the limits of his tolerance, he presents both literally and metaphorically as a square. He will need to keep a grip on himself as the times are a changing, as the 1964 Bob Dylan song warns. Judging by his receding hairline, time is not on his side. He is Man Alone, not in the bush but in the “burbs”, and his way of life is under threat.