George Shaw: The Sly and the Unseen, Baltic, Gateshead

For almost two decades, George Shaw has been painting, doggedly and systematically, the unprepossessing, post-war housing estate in Coventry where he grew up. The means he uses – Humbrol household paints – are as modest in their workadayness and as limited in their tonal range as the subject matter itself. It is as if Shaw has positively wanted to strait-jacket himself in this way.

Almost everything that we see in these paintings is face-on and centred within the picture frame, as if shamelessly gawping back at us: groups of garages; the end wall of a house; the local bus stop or the cop shop. He often favours nooks and crannies, odd twists in a road, locked doors and gates. Everything is past its best. The very idea of these places having had a best in the first place is almost laughable. There is a curious absence of humanity. Occasionally, the lights will be on in an upstairs room, but that is as much of a human presence as these paintings ever register. The light is often uniformly dull and subdued, almost sourly so, edging off to evening. There is frequent evidence of the aftermath of rain – the wet sheen on flag stones, making them look uneven, drab, a clichéd reminder of a culture blighted by chill and damp.

Dead End shows us a view of a garages, with a pitted approach road. The garages face a wall. There is no way out. As usual, nothing is happening. The very bleakness of the scene gives it a mild air of menace, as if it has been singled out for attention because it looks so troublingly unremarkable. Locked gates, boarded-up windows, graffitied walls feel like sad calls for attention. It could be a crime scene. In general, the subject matter seems to be talking itself down. The mood is anti-heroic, bleak, Larkinesque. By contrast, the titles talk up the paintings, as if giving them a gravitas they have no right to possess. An entire sequence takes Christ's Passion as its collective title – a nod in the direction of Shaw's sometime Catholicism. It is as if he is recording a time between times, not only when nothing actually happens, but when nothing deserves to happen. Occasionally, symbolism is brought into play, a touch heavy-handedly. A painting entitled Ash Wednesday shows us a distant church behind a stout fence, bathed in a dying orange light. This is almost a poem written by the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, about the slow, melancholy withering away of organised religion. And, come to think of it, quite a lot of these paintings – and especially the ones that capture the moods of snatches of woodlands and park – seem positively pre-Raphaelite in their fastidious attention to flowers and leaves.

And yet, for all their unremarkableness, these paintings are utterly remarkable. They seem to have captured, quite uncannily, the quidditas of the humdrum, and to be raising it up in front of our eyes as if inviting us to look behind and beyond what we see. They are not so much their banal subject matter as the products of a painter who is haunted by that subject matter. They are not so much the depiction of a circumscribed world as a view of England, dying into itself, unloved, unregarded.

To 15 May (0191 478 1810)