Exhibition view
Royal Academy 251st Summer Exhibition, 2019, London
Exhibition view
Royal Academy 251st Summer Exhibition, 2019, London
Exhibition view
Royal Academy 251st Summer Exhibition, 2019, London
Exhibition view
Royal Academy 251st Summer Exhibition, 2019, London
Exhibition view

My paintings present a twilit, hallucinatory world haunted by the presence of the human figure. Light falls on flesh. Bodies coalesce with their surroundings. Painting twilight allows me to create a sensuous world in which chimeras can emerge.
I often assemble my compositions from squares of newspaper, newsprint, and layout paper stuck onto the canvas. This creates a distinctly cubist aesthetic that fragments and interrupts the painted surface. This method reflects my deep engagement with the cubist principles of assemblage, collage, multiple perspectives and simultaneity.
My paintings are machines for producing disquietude, designed to delay or interrupt the arrival of meaning. Figures don’t cohere into allegory, objects don’t settle into symbolism, desire doesn’t resolve into identity or narrative. I seek to hold the moment open before meaning arrives — a rupture where fear, tenderness, appetite and desire coexist, not yet crystallised.
Ultimately my work explores both the desire and the disquietude in the human experience through my life as a gay man in the city and more recently in rural isolation.