Following an eight-month period away from the studio, I became increasingly occupied with observing rather than producing work. Much of this time was spent navigating the continual stream of images circulating through digital platforms, a condition characterised less by focused looking than by an accelerated and often overwhelming mode of consumption. While this environment offers access to an unprecedented volume of artistic production, it also produces a form of visual saturation in which distinction, criticality, and sustained attention become increasingly difficult to maintain.
Encountering this continual flow of images prompted questions about the viability of my own practice, particularly in relation to forms of painting that resist the visually optimised and highly consumable strategies increasingly rewarded by social media economies. Confronted by these conditions, I began to question whether there remains a space for painting that is self-critical in orientation, concerned not simply with image production but with an interrogation of painting's assumptions, conventions, and historical role. More fundamentally, I questioned whether such a practice continues to justify its own existence.
Yet the impulse to paint persists despite these doubts. The compulsive return to the medium suggests a relationship that exceeds rational justification, binding artistic production to forms of desire, habit, and identification that are difficult to abandon.
In attempting to understand this condition, I turned to the example of a number of British conceptual artists working during the 1960s and 1970s, including Bob Law, John Latham, Art & Language, Victor Burgin, John Stezaker, and Keith Arnatt. Faced with what appeared to be the culmination and dominance of modernist painting, these artists did not seek to compete within its established terms. Instead, they redirected attention towards the structures, definitions, and ideological assumptions that underpin artistic production itself. Their work shifted the focus from the art object to the critical examination of art's conditions of possibility.
This body of work is informed by the questions that emerged from those conceptual practices: What constitutes art? What functions does it perform? Under what conditions does it acquire meaning and value? Rather than providing answers, the paintings operate as a framework through which such questions can be rehearsed and re-examined.
The visual form of the works emerges from this enquiry. Their accompanying texts, however, are generated through artificial intelligence, introducing a further layer of uncertainty regarding authorship, interpretation, and artistic labour. In this respect, the texts do not merely describe the paintings but become part of the work's wider investigation into production, mediation, and the increasingly unstable boundaries between human and machine-generated meaning. Indeed, the present text is itself produced through that process.