Art - Ned Denny admires the loneliness and silence of de Chirico's most solitary figure

Perhaps uniquely among modernist painters, Giorgio de Chirico requires that we suspend disbelief in front of his works and step inside. And once there, once in one of those blank-faced piazzas bathed in the light of an always unseen sun, we lose both sense of time and power of speech. What he gives with one hand, he takes away with the other. His paintings may seem to reassert the clear depths of Renaissance perspective, but they do so in such a way as to make them disquieting and ineffably strange. Their seeming orderliness acts as a kind of lure, tricking us into a space as banal and inexplicable as a half-remembered dream.

And whereas the open window of traditional western painting had asserted man's sovereign right to an unimpeded view of the world, de Chirico hides as much as he reveals. Horizons are obscured behind long brick walls, views are blocked by looming arcades and an unseen figure is only given away by the shadow he casts. We are shown only the undisclosed.

One effect of this curious blankness, this radical lack of incident, is to make the mind focus on details. In the utter silence of a de Chirico square, single pebbles and cracks in pillars seem to resonate with secret meaning. In the absence of sound, we begin to hear the voice of things. And when de Chirico names one of his loneliest and most beautiful paintings The Delights of the Poet, I don't think he is being ironic but, rather, referring to this bare beauty, this weirdly charged emptiness that only the most solitary can sense.

Which brings us to Ariadne, de Chirico's paintings of whom are the subject of this small but illuminating show at the Estorick Collection. Abandoned on the island of Naxos after having helped Theseus escape the Minotaur, Ariadne is one of the most famous solitaries in classical mythology. Until, that is, the more loving Dionysus comes along and snaps her up, which is the moment Titian chose to illustrate in the wonderful painting that now hangs in the National Gallery. But de Chirico belongs to the somewhat smaller group of artists who show not the joyful union with the god but rather Ariadne as she sleeps, oblivious to her lover's departure. Even more unusually, he depicts her not as living flesh but as stone.

For a sense of quite how peculiar de Chirico's version of the story is, you just need to take a look at a typical late 19th-century portrayal of the same scene. In John William Waterhouse's Ariadne (1898), we see her asleep on a marble bench as the ship sets sail. But the real subject of the painting is the merest bud of a breast, revealed by her gown having slipped aside. Essentially, it's just another piece of mild Victorian erotica, whereas de Chirico's Melanconia (1912), the first painting in the Ariadne series, shows her as a colossal statue with limbs like tree trunks. She has her back to the omnipresent raking light and two departing figures, and we can see the long shadow of someone else (Dionysus, perhaps?) concealed behind a pillar in the foreground. The sky is almost obscured by a building or arcade that appears a repository of darkness, the deep gloom of the upper windows seeming to leach out into the surrounding stone.

The same ominously benighted arcades appear in Ariadne and The Soothsayer's Recompense (both 1913), the huge pair of works that forms the centrepiece of the exhibition. Once again, the Titan-like figure faces away from the sun and into her own shadow, the only presence in a bare hinterland separated from the sea by a doorless wall. Like a demolition site at the moment before the charges are blown, everything holds its breath.

But do these crude, haunting images refer to the myth of Ariadne in anything other than a highly oblique way? I think they do. In fact, by picturing the story in a symbolic, rather than realistic manner, de Chirico comes far closer to its secret meaning. According to Nietzsche, who was a huge influence on de Chirico and who once planned a "perfect book" that would have been interspersed with dialogues between Theseus, Ariadne and Dionysus, the woman was the myth's truly heroic figure. Deserted by Theseus, who is linked with the rational world of Apollo, she has to endure an extremity of solitude before finding her redemption in the savage beauty symbolised by Dionysus. And so in de Chirico's paintings we see the sun setting on the Apollonian city of harmony and order, and we feel fear at what the darkness might hold. And so, too, we see Ariadne, whom the dictates of reason have turned to stone, waiting for the night in which all statues wake.

"Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne" is at the Estorick Collection, London N1 (020 7704 9522) until 13 April

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