George Raftopoulos was born in Sydney in 1972, the son of Greek parents. His childhood, from the age of five, was spent in the New South Wales town of Grenfell. Gold had been discovered in the stringybark- and wattle-covered hills of Grenfell in 1866. Within four months the population had swelled to eight thousand or so, a lively (and sometimes combustible) mixture of races, attitudes and types. Henry Lawson, whose bush ballads came to distil and signify, for many people, the nature of Australian country life and rural people, had been born in Grenfell a century before Raftopoulos's arrival. In the 1970s, the Raftopouloses found themselves to be the only Greek family in the town. In this context, as a youth, George ruminated on questions of cultural identity. They are questions his paintings continue to plumb.

George Raftopoulos speaks of his painting as "mapping the memory". He refers to his paintings incorporating fragmentary references to places he has been, events he has witnessed, and sensations he has experienced. He refers, too, to his paintings touching aspects of his race memory, aspects of his cultural lineage.

He has had two extended stays in Greece, seeking to absorb his family's cultural foundations in Corfu, and to trace his generational connections there. As Raftopoulos travelled in Greece, he felt close to the great dramas of Greek myth, to the inspiring threads of Greek history, and to that remote past where legends and facts intersect. Greek myth and history both dealt with heroic sacrifice and betrayal, with noble struggles against the odds and with redemption. With Greece's critical position at the bridge of Europe and Asia, the stakes for Western civilization were always high. He is interested in classical Greek theatre, and his own paintings have a similar grandeur of scale and comparable sense of the momentous.

Raftopoulos also visited Delphi, where the prophetesses' oracular messages would frequently allow for more than one interpretation. Here at Delphi, as Wallace Everett Caldwell put it, "the good sense of the Greeks recognised the right of the god to give deceptive advice which might lead men to fated ruin, or to give presuming questions about the future those ambiguous answers...". Raftopoulos's own paintings are similarly cryptical.

Raftopoulos has been reading the work of psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, especially as it relates to issues of time and history. Raftopoulos was interested in Lacan's writing about the historic significances of names. He also encountered Lacan's writings on cultural memory - the way cultural patterns are maintained, exchanged and transmitted across generations. Lacan also wrote about material fragments of the past. He wrote of the "intrusive" past, of slippage and of forgetting.

Raftopoulos's phrase "mapping the memory" does not refer to some procedure of mapping as cartography, where geography is defined and the relationships between features are carefully calibrated. Nor does this mapping resemble diarising, where responses to places or circumstances are linked in terms of sequence and analysed in terms of motive. It is more like rummaging through the shards of a life or a culture that is partly beyond reach and sometimes beyond understanding. The shards have faded over time, but perhaps the ideas they evoke are the more intriguing for their remoteness and for the speculation they provoke.

Raftopoulos's paintings have always possessed an expressionist fierceness. He describes his method of painting as an "interactive process", in that it is undertaken without the safety net of preliminary studies. His work of the mid-1990s was peopled by human/animal hybrids, inhabiting a world that combined playfulness with anxiety and apprehension. He admired the nimble, serpentine and raw line of John Olsen at this time, but he simultaneously respected the powerful, dreadnought line of Stan Rapotec. He was also attracted to the scribbles and inscriptions of the graffitist - whether irreverent and anti-social from ancient Pompeii, or forlorn and desperate from the cell of the condemned. Line plays a key role in his current painting, and his line is both economical and swift. It is as firm and elastic as cartilage. Most of Raftopoulos's works of the last couple of years have turned on a single colour, which sets the temper of the painting. Recently that sole colour has often been a primary colour. His interest in the expansive use of a single colour may have been reinforced by his flying in a light aircraft over the Western Australian landscape around Kununurra, in mid 2002. The sweeping land below was dry and monochromatic, although the corrugations of the ground's surface lent that colour tonal changes and textural complexity. This is not to suggest that his paintings are intended to evoke the landscape; on the contrary, his general avoidance of green or earth colours or skylines asserts a basic concern for abstractedness.

Raftopoulos's recent paintings share a structure of very loosely brushed rectangles. Raftopoulos's initial university studies, in 1991, were in architecture. However, he soon became disenchanted with architecture's precision. It appeared to him to be a discipline ill suited to dealing with issues of equivocation and ambiguity, and he transferred his studies to visual arts. Still, he retains something of the architect's finesse in balancing form and space, and a scaffolding of vertical and horizontal masses underpins his current work. Dispersed frugally across this structure are linear elements. Initially, the line appears to bear an abstract and purely formal role, adding focus and lucidity to the broadly brushed grounds. However most of these images also relate distantly to the body: to the lithe arch of the breast, to the solid profile of the head or helmet, and to the lean silhouette of the body.

Raftopoulos has been exploring current avant-garde Greek music, especially music that combines aspects of Greek musical traditions with contemporary expressionist sensibilities. Iannis Xenakis's "Pleiades" is a body of percussive work he particularly admires. Xenakis adopts a spare, roughly blocked structure that is measured and insistent. This in turn is offset against passages of flooding cacophony and unanticipated strikes of improvised discord. The spirit of this combination is paralleled in Raftopoulos's paintings. Many of Raftopoulos's paintings are inscribed with a single word, printed in the Greek alphabet. These are generally references to figures in history, particularly Greek history, whose presence or actions have influenced the outcome of events that touch us still. For example, one painting carries the roughly lettered name of a military figure who played a critical role in the naval battle at Salamis. Here, in the narrow passages and sea-straits between the island of Salamis and the coast of Attica, against a sky that was black and red from the Acropolis put to the Persian torch, a smaller Greek fleet outmanoeuvred and shattered the exceedingly powerful invading fleet of Xerxes. It was a victory achieved through guile, dissembling and ingenuity. Greece was saved, for the moment. Raftopoulos isn't interested in narrating an account of the battle, but simply by citing the name of a key participant, he alludes to issues of great causes, high stakes, and the duplicitous manoeuvrings that may be necessary to achieve victory.

As well as Greek words, his paintings often incorporate numerals, usually dual digits. Their significance remains entirely oblique: they may relate to sensitive military formations, engineering calculations, dates, or map coordinates; they may have secret strategic import, or they may be utterly innocuous. They are Delphic and inscrutable. The Roman poet Horace wrote of the Greek heroes of prehistory: Long before Agamemnon, heroes lived, a host, But all have gone, without a tear, Without a name, into time's long night: No Homer sang for them. The figures of prehistory may be unreachable, but George Raftopoulos is conscious of the lives of heroes and yeomen of Greek history. His paintings (like Homer's writing) sing for them.

Peter Pinson Professor, College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Author, monographs of Rodney Milgate 1995, Emanuel Raft 1997and Elwyn Lynn 2002