^{ABBA Voyage, ABBA Arena, London. Image credit: ABBA Voyage.}

I’ve been resisting the urge for a very long time, but a couple of weeks ago I finally made it to ABBA Voyage. If you’ve somehow managed to remain unenlightened about what ABBA Voyage is, it’s a virtual concert residency featuring digital avatars of the iconic Swedish pop group ‘performing’ their greatest bangers. Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid appear on stage as they looked in the 1970s, simultaneously stepping back in time and into a digitally simulated future. It’s every bit as perfect as it sounds: impeccable pop music, sci-fi disco lighting, people dancing in their seats, prosecco sloshing liberally around the arena. It was 100 minutes of pure happiness.

But it was also very strange. Obviously, I knew that ABBA weren’t actually performing in front of me. Nobody in the audience was being deceived; we all knew that we were watching an extravagant illusion. Yet after a remarkably short period of time, somewhere within the first five seconds of the avatars rising up through the stage floor, this knowledge ceased to matter. Why were we clapping something that wasn’t there? Why was I nearly crying when ‘ABBA’ appeared as they are now, older and more fragile-looking, to wave us out of the auditorium at the end of the show? It felt like ABBA were… there. So why does something we know isn’t physically there still feel present?

It’s not as simple as just using advanced new technologies. Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the visual effects company whose work stretches from Jurassic Park to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, began by putting the real members of ABBA through five weeks of motion capture, filming them performing a 22-song set with around 160 cameras. Their movements, alongside performances by younger body doubles, were used to create their digital counterparts (actually called ABBAtars, as if you couldn’t guess). It’s important to note that these aren’t holograms. In fact, there is remarkably little that seems ephemeral about them. They appear solid, fleshy and touchable, occupying the stage with the apparent weight and volume of physical bodies. The illusion is extraordinarily sophisticated, combining CGI with carefully synchronised virtual and physical lighting, but at its heart may be a surprisingly old idea. Although the precise method remains closely guarded, the illusion is thought to draw on a large-scale version of a nineteenth-century theatrical technique known as Pepper’s Ghost.

Pepper’s Ghost was originally devised in 1858 by English engineer Henry Dircks, who developed a system for producing ghostly figures on stage using reflected light. His design proved difficult to accommodate within existing theatres, but in 1862 British scientist and inventor John Henry Pepper adapted it into a workable form. Pepper subsequently popularised the illusion through public demonstrations, including an 1862 stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novella The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, and his name became synonymous with the illusion from that point on. Pepper’s Ghost uses a light source and an angled reflection to create an optical illusion. The stage is divided into two zones: one that can be seen by the audience and one that is hidden from them. A plate of glass is positioned onstage at a 45-degree angle, reflecting a brightly lit performer stationed in the hidden area. The performer’s reflection is seen by the audience in the angled glass, appearing as a ghostly apparition occupying the stage in front of them. The illusion works because glass becomes more reflective as the area behind it becomes darker.

^{Bertrand (no first name given), Pepper’s Ghost stage set-up, published in Le Monde Illustré, no. 406, 21 January 1865, p. 48.}

ABBA Voyage clearly has much more going on than simply reflecting moving images of its performers, but Pepper’s Ghost is an important historical precursor to the kinds of illusion through which an absent body can be made to apparently occupy physical space. And this matters here because the audience doesn’t necessarily have to believe the ghost is real for the apparition to work. It brings us back to the distinction already suggested by ABBA Voyage: belief isn’t required for something to feel present.

In the nineteenth century, the relationship between new technologies and apparitions wasn’t confined to theatrical illusion. At precisely the moment Pepper was putting ghosts on stage, other scientists and inventors were asking whether technology might reveal forms of presence that were already there. One of them was Cromwell Fleetwood Varley, an English engineer whose achievements included important work on the electric telegraph and the transatlantic telegraph cable. He was also deeply interested in spiritualism and paranormal phenomena.

Varley’s wife Ada was a medium who claimed to communicate with spirits, sometimes passing messages from them to her husband. For many Victorians, there were obvious parallels between telegraphy and spiritualism: both seemed to involve communication across invisible boundaries, and spiritualists frequently borrowed the language of telegraphy to describe communication with the dead. Varley sat unusually comfortably between these two worlds. He eventually began applying his telegraphic expertise to spiritualist investigations, using electrical apparatus to test mediums and séance phenomena. Rather than seeing science and spiritualism as incompatible, he attempted to bring the methods of one to bear upon the other, perhaps recognising that both were grappling with similar problems of credibility and public scepticism.

One of Varley’s most high-profile investigations was his 1874 electrical test of the medium Florence Cook. Using apparatus developed through his work with telegraphy, he attempted to establish whether Cook remained inside a darkened ‘cabinet’ while her supposed spirit manifestation, Katie King, appeared in the séance room. Varley treated Cook, in his own words, as a ‘telegraph cable’, passing an electrical current from one wrist along her arms to the other. A reflecting galvanometer monitored the circuit so that any interruption should indicate that Cook had left the cabinet. Varley reported no such interruption and interpreted this as evidence that Cook had remained in place while Katie appeared elsewhere.

^{Florence Cook in a trance with the purported materialisation of Katie King, 1874. Photograph probably by William Crookes.}

Varley’s interest went beyond the scientific investigation of other people’s paranormal experiences. He also claimed that while asleep his spirit could sometimes act independently of his material body, becoming what he described as an ‘agent of his will’. These experiences contributed to his conviction ‘that we are not our bodies; that when we die we exist just as much as before’, and that under certain conditions communication remained possible between the living and the dead. More intriguingly for what we’re considering here, Varley also believed that some spiritual phenomena might be produced by ‘the spirits of those whose bodies are present’. Sound familiar?

Obviously, Varley did not predict ABBA Voyage from a Victorian séance room, but his words, ‘we are not our bodies’, feel unexpectedly relevant some 150 years later. Technological culture, whether telegraphs, Pepper’s Ghost or not-really-there pop stars, keeps returning us to the same problem: how much of a person can exist somewhere their body isn’t?

I’ve been looking into practices of automatic drawing as part of my studio research and last week discovered the work of Alma Rumball. Rumball was a mediumistic artist who lived most of her life in Muskoka, in rural Ontario, eventually becoming what her family describes as a ‘clairvoyant recluse’. Around the age of 50, she experienced a vision of Christ accompanied by a panther. She said that Christ told her, ‘you must draw and you must write’. After this encounter, Rumball reported becoming clairvoyant and began producing drawings and writings through an entity she called The Hand. She maintained that she watched as The Hand drew unfamiliar forms and figures independently of her own consciousness, and took no credit for the prolific body of work that resulted.

Rumball’s drawings are extraordinarily complex, depicting another world through layers of jewel-like colour, organic forms and strange figures, often connected at their mouths by tube-like structures. Rumball said that these tubes allowed the figures to communicate with one another. The drawings therefore give physical form to something that cannot otherwise be seen: an infrastructure for invisible communication.

^{Alma Rumball, untitled drawing, known as Alma and Aba Communicating, date unknown. Title assigned by Wendy Oke. Courtesy of the Alma Rumball Estate.}

Looking at Rumball’s drawings for the first time, I found myself thinking again about Eva Hesse. There’s no suggestion of a direct connection between the two artists, but Rumball’s tubes have a strange visual affinity with the conduits, plugs and umbilical lines that populate Hesse’s machine drawings of the 1960s. I’ve written about these works before as ‘soft machines’, images in which bodily and technological systems become difficult to distinguish. Rumball’s drawings make me see that ambiguity slightly differently. Her figures seem to communicate through their bodies, connected by a network that is simultaneously anatomical and technological. In both artists’ work, the line does more than describe an object. It starts to behave like a connection between things.

What feels continuous across these examples isn’t really the technology at all, but us. The apparatus changes, from glass and telegraph wires to digital images and invisible networks, while the questions remain remarkably familiar. We keep developing new ways to extend images, voices and other traces of ourselves beyond the limits of our physical bodies, then become unsettled when those technologies make the boundaries between presence and absence less certain than they seemed before. Perhaps new technologies don’t create these strange desires so much as give us new ways to act them out.

I thought ABBA Voyage was wonderful, but I can’t deny that part of its appeal lies in how brilliantly peculiar it is. Everyone in the audience knew perfectly well that Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid were not physically performing in front of us. They are also, importantly, not dead. And yet the spectacle trades on something structurally very close to a haunting: bodies from another time return and become perceptually present in the here and now.

The archetypal Victorian ghost always seems to bring roughly the same message: the dead are still here. ABBA Voyage offers a subtly different proposition: the past can still be here. Increasingly, this extends far beyond virtual concerts. Generative technologies suggest another possibility: anything that has left sufficient traces behind might, in some form, be made present again. Photographs, recordings, movements, voices and fragments of data become the raw material from which another kind of presence can be assembled.

In the ABBA song ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’, written by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, there’s a line that now seems strangely appropriate: ‘Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture’. More than forty years later, this is almost literally what ABBA Voyage has done. The image has been frozen, but it has also been made to move again. The young bodies return while the people themselves continue to age somewhere else.

Perhaps this explains some of what I found unexpectedly moving about the final moments of the concert. When the present-day ABBA appeared at the end, older and more fragile-looking, they weren’t physically there either. Yet seeing these older digital bodies after spending the previous 100 minutes with their younger selves suddenly made the passage of time visible. For a moment, past and present seemed to occupy the same stage, even though neither was actually there.

None of this makes ABBA Voyage frightening. It is joyful, spectacular and knowingly artificial. Nobody has been replaced and nobody needs to believe that an apparition is real. Perhaps that is what makes it so interesting. We will willingly spend an evening clapping, dancing and emotionally responding to bodies we know are not there. From Pepper’s glass stage to Varley’s telegraph wires, Rumball’s strange tubes and the invisible technological infrastructure of ABBA Voyage, we keep finding new ways to make absence behave like presence, and today the apparitions we see no longer even require a ghost.

^{ABBA Voyage, ABBA Arena, London. Photograph © Dirk Lindner, Stufish.}

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Sources

Richard J. Noakes, ‘Telegraphy is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 32:4 (1999), pp. 421–459.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-for-the-history-of-science/article/abs/telegraphy-is-an-occult-art-cromwell-fleetwood-varley-and-the-diffusion-of-electricity-to-the-other-world/95A66EC53BF82CF62F8C6E2F7E1F4DF7

London Dialectical Society, Report on Spiritualism, of the Committee of the London Dialectical Society (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1871).
https://archive.org/details/reportofspiritua00lond/page/110/mode/2up

Leonie Mercedes, ‘How ABBA Voyage Was Made’, Ingenia, Issue 100 (September 2024).
https://www.ingenia.org.uk/articles/how-abba-voyage-was-made/

Alma Matters / Alma Rumball Estate, biographical and collection material on Alma Rumball.
http://www.almamatters.ca/

Lately my studio has been full of disembodied voices. They arrive through headphones rather than séances, carried wirelessly instead of spiritually, but they’re telling remarkably old stories. I’ve been listening to podcasts in which people recount real-life encounters with ghosts. They make surprisingly good painting companions. The stories usually unfold in much the same way, so I don’t have to follow every detail while I’m working. Whether or not I believe them is beside the point.

Painting feels well suited to ghost stories. Flicking my attention back and forth between canvas and podcast, I began noticing how often the stories weren’t really just about ghosts, but about uncertainty. Someone hears footsteps in an empty attic, notices a shadowy figure in the corner of a room, feels like they’re being watched by an invisible presence. The haunting begins not with evidence but with interpretation, long before anyone decides that they’re living in a haunted house. Whether or not I’m convinced by the ghosts themselves isn’t important. What interests me is the moment before certainty arrives, when something familiar becomes slightly strange and people start looking for explanations, logical at first and, sooner or later, much less so.

Maybe every era invents the ghosts it needs. One of the research rabbit holes I’ve fallen down recently is the curious relationship between Victorian spiritualism and new technologies. As electricity, photography and telecommunications began to transform everyday life, invisible forces suddenly became imaginable in entirely new ways. Messages travelled through wires without visible carriers, voices emerged from telephones, and images appeared on screens. Paradoxically, as technology became more advanced, the world itself was becoming increasingly mysterious.

Spiritualism, the belief that human consciousness survives physical death and that the living can communicate with the dead, flourished in exactly this moment. But séances weren’t simply eccentric parlour games born from a fascination with invisible forces. They also created a curious new kind of public platform. At a time when many women’s voices, particularly those of working-class women, were routinely dismissed, the séance offered a space in which they could speak with unexpected authority. Society might ignore what a woman had to say, yet listen intently if those same words appeared to come from a ghost. New technologies had transformed people’s sense of what might be possible; spiritualism expanded ideas about who, or what, was allowed to speak. The invisible wasn’t just becoming something people feared or marvelled at. It was becoming something people were prepared to listen to.

The history becomes even stranger when you realise how often technological invention and spiritualism overlap. Engineers, inventors and psychical researchers frequently occupied the same circles. Jeffrey Sconce’s wonderful book Haunted Media1 traces how the telegraph, telephone, radio and television were repeatedly imagined as technologies capable of communicating with the dead. This became such a familiar idea that it permeated popular consciousness. Films such as Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist (1982) capture this anxiety perfectly, transforming the family’s television from a familiar domestic object into a supernatural portal.

It’s easy to find humour in this now from the comfort of the twenty-first century, but I wonder if that’s only because we’ve replaced those ghosts with different ones. After all, we don’t encounter algorithms in the way previous generations encountered machines. Nobody points to one and says, “There it is”.

Instead, today’s technological ghosts reveal themselves indirectly. We’ve all experienced an advert on our phones that appears moments after we’ve mentioned something in conversation. Or a Spotify playlist that feels uncannily well matched to our mood. Or I tell a friend that perhaps we should both eat more protein, only to open Instagram ten minutes later and find ourselves staring into a vortex of bodybuilders and recipes using remarkable quantities of cottage cheese. Rationally, I know this probably isn’t evidence that my phone has been secretly listening to me. Emotionally, however, there’s always a tiny flicker of doubt. Nothing supernatural has actually happened, and yet something feels… off.

Perhaps that’s why ghost stories continue to resonate. They’re less about dead people than they are about invisible agencies whose presence we can only infer through their effects. The ghosts have changed but the feeling hasn’t.

Artists, of course, have been thinking about invisible presence for much longer than Silicon Valley. Susan Hiller spent decades exploring the strange territory between belief and scepticism. Her installations reference testimony, folklore, disembodied voices and experiences that resist a straightforward explanation. She described aspects of her practice as “paraconceptual”—a term that I love because it refuses to settle comfortably on either side of the rational/irrational divide. Her work isn’t asking whether ghosts exist. It’s asking what kinds of experiences we dismiss simply because they don’t fit the systems we’ve built for understanding the world.

Where Hiller explored ghosts through folklore, Sandra Mujinga approaches them through digital culture. Her work Flo (2019) draws on the holographic performances of Tupac Shakur and Whitney Houston. Nobody watching holographic Tupac at Coachella in 2012 believed he had literally returned from the dead. Yet thousands of people still cheered, cried and held up their phones to record him. Technology hadn’t resurrected the dead, but it had created something that occupied an eerily familiar territory between presence and absence. Ghosts, it turns out, have become remarkably high definition.

Back in the studio I’ve noticed something similar happening in my own paintings. Lately I’ve been making drawings of crystals, coral and fragments of old machinery. The more closely I look, the harder it becomes to decide where nature ends and technology begins. A damaged circuit board resembles a fossil, crystals appear to be pixellated, mechanical joints begin to feel anatomical. I’m no longer sure whether I’m borrowing forms from biology or engineering because, increasingly, they seem to be borrowing from one another.

Perhaps that’s what keeps me returning to them. They’re difficult to classify, occupying an uncertain territory between the natural and the artificial, the mechanical and the organic. They occupy the same threshold as the stories I’ve been listening to while I paint: places where familiar categories begin to dissolve. Maybe that’s what ghosts have always been; not supernatural beings, but placeholders for whatever exceeds the limits of our current understanding. Victorian ghosts drifted through country houses and flickered around séance tables. Today they seem more likely to travel through fibre-optic cables, recommendation engines and neural networks. They’re no easier to see than their predecessors. We simply give them different names.

I’m not looking for proof that ghosts exist. What interests me is that every generation seems to need its own ways of imagining the invisible. Art has always found forms for things we don’t yet have the language to recognise: spirits, memories, beliefs, electricity, systems, artificial intelligence. Some of these are measurable and others psychological. Some are entirely cultural. All of them are real because of the effects they produce rather than because we can point to them.

Tomorrow morning I’ll probably put another ghost podcast on while I paint. It isn’t lost on me that I encounter these ghost stories through another invisible system. The voices arrive wirelessly through my headphones, carried by technologies that would have seemed every bit as uncanny to a nineteenth-century spiritualist. I’ll hear more real-life experiences of unexplained noises, floating objects or mysterious shadows, and I may or may not be convinced by the haunting itself. What I’ll keep believing, though, is that every generation invents new ways of talking about the things that slip beyond explanation. Victorian mediums found ghosts in electrical currents. We find them in algorithms, neural networks and recommendation engines. Art has always inhabited that space. It doesn’t prove that the invisible exists, but gives form to the strange feeling that something is there, even when we can’t quite name it.

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Images from top:

Charley Peters, work in progress (2026)

Still from Poltergeist (1982), produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper. Image source: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).

Susan Hiller, Channels (2013), Multi-channel video installation, 106 television sets, 9 media players, 7 dvd players, signal splitters. Image source: Bernard G Mills

Charley Peters, drawings from the Natural History Museum, London (2026)

Hologram of Tupac Shakur performing at Coachella (2012). Image source: AV Concepts / Digital Domain.

A few weeks ago, I found myself returning to Kirk Varnedoe’s Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock (2006). It’s one of those books that rewards rereading because it refuses the tired old question of whether abstract art “means” anything. Instead, Varnedoe argues that abstraction has continually reinvented itself, developing new ways of producing meaning precisely by moving away from representation. Rather than seeing abstraction as a story of reduction or purity, he presents it as a restless history of experimentation, contradiction and renewal.

Reading it again, I realised that one question has stayed with me long after I closed the book: What happens after Minimalism? I don’t mean historically, as there are plenty of surveys that can answer that, but conceptually. What happens once art has pushed reduction as far as it can? Once form has been stripped back to geometry, industrial fabrication and serial repetition, and once neutrality itself has become an aesthetic?

In the 1960s, it must have felt as though art had reached a kind of logical conclusion. Donald Judd’s fabricated objects, Carl Andre’s floor pieces and Sol LeWitt’s systems all proposed that the artwork no longer needed illusion, narrative or expressive gesture. Reduction wasn’t simply a style; it was a method for thinking clearly. Artists could remove everything unnecessary and perhaps something fundamental would finally reveal itself. However, the world that Minimalism described no longer feels like the world we inhabit today.

The industrial object has given way to the digital system. Stable forms have become invisible infrastructures, and we live among algorithms, cloud computing, machine learning, biological engineering and networked platforms. Technology no longer arrives as a solid object that sits in front of us. It behaves more like an environment: distributed, adaptive and often impossible to locate.

This isn’t the first time artists have turned to the language of systems. In his influential essay Systems Esthetics (1968), Jack Burnham argued that art was shifting away from discrete objects towards networks of relationships, processes and exchanges. It was a remarkably prescient observation, but the systems Burnham described still belonged largely to an industrial age of visible structures and cybernetic models. The systems that shape contemporary life are more elusive. They operate through code, data, machine learning and planetary infrastructures that are rarely encountered directly, even as they quietly organise our experience of the world.

Minimalism was still concerned with objects, however rigorously they were reduced. Our technological reality, by contrast, is organised through relationships, feedback loops and systems that rarely possess a stable form. This changes what images need to do.

We often assume that complexity produces confusion and reduction produces clarity. Minimalism was built on that assumption. Yet digital technologies have quietly inverted the relationship. Today’s systems are rarely understood by isolating their individual parts; they make sense through networks of interdependence, feedback and emergence. Complexity is no longer the opposite of understanding. Increasingly, it is the condition of understanding.

It also changes what painting needs to do. Perhaps this is why so much contemporary painting has moved away from the hard geometries that dominated late twentieth-century abstraction. Increasingly, painters seem drawn towards unstable surfaces, synthetic membranes, fragmented bodies and strange hybrid forms that feel simultaneously biological and technological.

Think about the proliferating spatial collisions in Sarah Sze’s paintings, where images assemble and dissolve across multiple temporalities, or Emma Webster’s uncanny landscapes, constructed first within game-engine software before being translated into paint, so that nature already feels simulated before the painting even begins. Amy Sillman’s paintings occupy a different territory again, using abstraction not as a language of reduction but as a way of thinking through uncertainty, contradiction and continuous revision. Her forms rarely settle into stable identities; they remain provisional, shifting and open to change, as though painting has become a way of thinking through systems rather than describing objects.

One artist has come to occupy a particularly interesting position within this story. Eva Hesse emerged alongside Minimalism but never seemed entirely comfortable within its logic. Where many of her contemporaries pursued precision and industrial certainty, Hesse introduced sagging latex, looping cords and unstable materials that appeared almost wilfully resistant to permanence. As I explored in a recent essay, those works now feel less like a rejection of Minimalism than an early glimpse of something that hadn’t yet fully arrived.

Rather than appearing as an eccentric footnote to Minimalism, Hesse now feels unexpectedly prophetic. Her sagging latex, looping cords and unstable materials anticipate a world in which technology itself has become soft, contingent and strangely bodily. Her sculptures seem less like objects than temporary states within larger processes of transformation.

Contemporary painting has quietly adapted to these conditions. The proliferation of membranes, unstable surfaces, hybrid anatomies and collapsing pictorial spaces is more than a passing aesthetic tendency; it reflects a world that increasingly resists stable categories and fixed boundaries. If the hard-edged object once offered a compelling model for understanding industrial modernity, today’s painters are more often drawn towards forms that mutate, overlap and remain unresolved because those qualities feel closer to the structures that now organise everyday life.

This, perhaps, is what comes after Minimalism. Not a rejection of its achievements, nor a return to expression in any straightforward sense, but a recognition that reduction is no longer the only route to clarity. If twentieth-century art searched for certainty by stripping things back to their essentials, contemporary painting often discovers meaning by holding complexity in view. Its strange objects, contaminated surfaces and unstable images don’t signal the end of abstraction so much as its next evolution, one better equipped for a world of networks, simulations and entangled systems.

Postscript
The first and last paintings reproduced here are separated by over a decade. At the time, I thought I was simply changing how I painted. Now, looking back, I think I was responding to a wider shift from objects to systems, and from systems to a visual language better able to express the complexity, uncertainty and entanglement of contemporary life.

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Images from top:
Charley Peters, Configuration #31 (2014), acrylic on panel, 23cm x 18cm
Donald Judd, Untitled (Stack) (1967), lacquer on galvanized iron, 101.6cm × 78.7cm x 22.8cm
Amy Sillman, South Street (2021),oil and acrylic on canvas. 182.9 x 152.4 cm
Charley Peters, Plug In, Play Hard (2025), acrylic on canvas, 100cm x 80cm

I love Eva Hesse’s work, and part of what continues to fascinate me is that it seems to become more contemporary with time.

This is an unusual thing to say about an artist whose work emerged in the late 1960s. We are used to thinking about art historically, placing artists within the movements and concerns of their moment. Hesse is usually positioned somewhere between Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, as though her work were a response to the hard geometries and industrial precision of sculpture. That account is not wrong; it is simply no longer enough.

Each time I return to Hesse’s machine drawings, they seem less like relics of a particular historical moment and more like descriptions of the world we now inhabit. Their peculiar power lies in the fact that they refuse to behave like machines at all. They droop, sag, leak and twist. Tubes resemble intestines. Mechanical structures soften into anatomy. Systems appear unstable before they have even begun to function. Nothing feels complete. Nothing feels entirely engineered. The longer I spend with these drawings, the harder it becomes to separate engineering from flesh.

I suspect this has less to do with Hesse herself than with the changing nature of the machine. The twentieth century imagined machines as objects. The twenty-first century experiences them as systems.

The machines that shaped the twentieth century were visible. They occupied space. They announced their function through form. Industrial modernism inherited this confidence. Steel, geometry and precision became visual shorthand for efficiency, rationality and control. Even when artists challenged these values, the machine itself remained a stable point of reference.

Contemporary technologies are different. We rarely experience them as individual objects. Instead, we encounter networks, algorithms, cloud infrastructures, artificial intelligence and responsive systems that operate across multiple locations simultaneously. Their boundaries are difficult to define. They update continually, learn from interaction, fail unpredictably and evolve over time. We no longer live alongside machines as separate things; we inhabit systems.

Seen through this shift, Hesse’s drawings begin to look remarkably different. They are not simply strange machines, nor surreal fantasies assembled from industrial parts. They become diagrams of systems under strain. Their looping connections proliferate without ever resolving into stable mechanisms. Their structures seem simultaneously engineered and biological, ordered yet vulnerable. They occupy an uneasy territory in which bodies and technologies cease to function as opposites.

This is not because Hesse somehow predicted artificial intelligence or digital culture. It is because artworks are not fixed in meaning. They acquire new significance as the conditions around them change. Hesse’s drawings have not altered, but the technological imagination through which we encounter them certainly has.

I find this shift increasingly difficult to ignore when thinking about contemporary painting more broadly. Many of the forms that now appear across painting refuse stable classification. They resemble organisms without becoming biological, machines without becoming mechanical, objects without remaining still. They occupy an uncertain state in which structure and softness, engineering and anatomy continually exchange places. They feel less like representations of things than attempts to give form to systems already in a state of instability.

Perhaps it could not be otherwise. Our visual culture is increasingly populated by entities that resist clear definition: generative images, synthetic biology, machine learning, responsive materials and autonomous systems. The inherited distinctions between natural and artificial, physical and digital, body and machine no longer feel secure. It would be surprising if painting remained untouched by these conditions.

What Hesse offers is not a way of illustrating this instability but a way of thinking through it. Her drawings never resolve into simple metaphors. They remain awkward, provisional and strangely vulnerable. They acknowledge that systems can be structured without being rigid, connected without being coherent, alive without being biological.

Perhaps this is why her work feels increasingly difficult to place historically. It belongs less to the industrial twentieth century than to our own moment, in which machines no longer present themselves as hard objects but as adaptive systems, and where the boundaries between technology and the body have become increasingly porous. What has changed is not simply the sophistication of our machines, but the fact that our technologies no longer behave like machines at all.

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Images from top:
Charley Peters, ‘Untitled Studio Drawing’ (2026), coloured pencil on paper, 25cm x 25cm
Eva Hesse, ‘Untitled’ (1965), ink, gouache and pencil on paper, 49.9cm × 64.9cm
Charley Peters, ‘Untitled Studio Drawings’ (2025), coloured pencil on paper, each 20cm x 15cm

There is a persistent tendency to think of digital culture as something disembodied, and the language that we use around technology encourages this. We talk about virtual space as though it exists somewhere other than here, as though digital experience takes place in some abstract elsewhere detached from the physical world. The screen is often imagined as a threshold between material reality and immaterial simulation, a portal through which the body disappears.

But this has never really been true. If anything, our relationship to digital technologies has become increasingly intimate, tactile and deeply physical. We do not simply look at screens; we press, swipe, drag, tap, scroll and hold. Digital systems are not encountered at a distance but through repeated bodily contact, through habits of touch that have become so embedded in daily life that they now feel almost involuntary.

This is one of the things that makes David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ feel so prescient. Released in 1999, at a moment when much cultural discussion still imagined the digital future in terms of sleek abstraction and immaterial networks, Cronenberg offered something stranger and more unsettling. His interfaces were not clean or invisible. They were biological, damp, vulnerable and grotesquely tactile.

In the film, players connect to the gaming world through fleshy bio-ports implanted at the base of the spine. These openings are plugged into organic consoles that pulse and twitch like living organisms. The technology of eXistenZ does not promise transcendence or escape from the body. It insists on exactly the opposite. Connection requires penetration, contact and exposure. The interface is visceral.

What feels so compelling about this now is the way it dismantles the fantasy that digital experience somehow frees us from embodiment. Cronenberg understood that interface is never abstract and is always material. It always happens somewhere, through something, to someone. Even the word digital quietly reminds us of this. Its root lies in the Latin digitus, meaning finger. Before the term referred to electronic systems or computational processes, it referred to counting on the hand. The digital was always tactile before it became technological. It belonged first to the body.

This etymology feels worth remembering because it punctures one of the more persistent myths surrounding contemporary technology: the idea that digital systems represent a move away from physical experience. In practice, the opposite is true. These systems reorganise bodily experience rather than replacing it. They choreograph attention through gesture. They train the hand into new rhythms of movement. They recalibrate the relationship between eye and touch. The swipe of a thumb across glass, the instinctive pinch to enlarge an image, the almost unconscious flick of a finger to dismiss one thing and summon another: these are not metaphors. They are learned physical behaviours, repeated until they become second nature. The body has not disappeared into digital culture, it has been rewritten through it.

This is one of the reasons painting continues to matter to me. Painting is, among other things, a stubbornly physical form of thinking. It unfolds through pressure, drag, resistance and hesitation. It requires a continual negotiation between hand, eye, surface and material. There is nothing frictionless about it.

My work often references the synthetic visual languages that increasingly shape contemporary perception: images that feel engineered, simulated or computationally constructed, forms that hover somewhere between the mechanical and the organic, the recognisable and the uncanny. What interests me is what happens when these visual conditions are translated back into paint; when the logic of seamless circulation encounters the slower, more resistant temporality of the painted surface. Something shifts in that translation. The hand introduces friction into systems designed for immediacy. It slows the image down. It turns looking into a more sustained encounter and returns visual experience to the register of touch.

This is where eXistenZ still feels unexpectedly useful. Beneath its body horror and biological absurdity lies a remarkably clear insight into the future we now inhabit. Cronenberg understood that technology was never moving towards disembodiment. It was moving towards ever more intimate forms of bodily integration. The question was never whether the digital would replace the body. It was always how it would reshape the terms through which the body encounters the world.

Painting occupies that threshold for me. It is its own kind of interface, a site where contemporary forms of visual mediation meet the resistant physicality of making. In that collision between synthetic image culture and manual sensation, something important becomes visible. Not an escape from the digital, but a way of touching it differently.

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Image: still from eXistenZ (1999), dir. David Cronenberg

Still life has always been concerned with dead matter. The term nature morte says this more clearly than the English equivalent ever does. Not simply “still” life, but dead life: objects detached from use, arranged into relation, held in suspension. Historically, these arrangements carried symbolic weight. Flowers decayed, fruit spoiled, candles burned down, skulls reminded the viewer of the inevitability of death. Vanitas painting transformed objects into structures for thinking about time.

What feels striking now is not that these themes have disappeared, but that they have migrated into different materials. Contemporary life is increasingly organised through systems and devices that age, fail, and become obsolete at extraordinary speed. Interfaces disappear. Hardware becomes unusable. Images degrade through compression, circulation, and endless reproduction. The contemporary world produces its own forms of dead matter.

This changes the logic of still life quite radically. The genre no longer needs to rely on inherited symbols like skulls or hourglasses in order to speak about mortality. Obsolescence is already embedded within the structures of contemporary technology itself. A cracked screen, a tangled cable, a broken render, an obsolete operating system: these are not simply updated vanitas motifs, but evidence of a culture organised around planned redundancy and continual replacement.

What interests me is not the illustrative use of these objects, but the way they destabilise distinctions between the organic and the mechanical, the living and the synthetic. Contemporary technologies increasingly mimic life while simultaneously accelerating forms of decay. Devices behave almost biologically: they age, fail, become corrupted, and are replaced. At the same time, organic forms are rendered through systems of simulation, modelling, and artificial enhancement. The boundary between object and organism becomes harder to stabilise.

Still life becomes an unexpectedly useful structure for thinking through this condition because it has always operated through tension: between life and death, permanence and transience, surface and disappearance. That tension now extends beyond symbolic objects and into the unstable systems that organise contemporary visual culture itself.

In this sense, the still life has not disappeared. It has become a condition rather than a genre.

–

Image: Unsubscribed from Your Reality (2025)

The distinction between abstract and figurative painting is no longer credible, yet we continue to use it as if nothing has changed. It persists because it is convenient, offering a familiar shorthand for what we think we are looking at. But convenience is not the same as accuracy, and the terms no longer reflect either the conditions under which images are most often encountered or the way many paintings now operate.

The shift becomes obvious when we consider how images are actually experienced. A meme sits alongside a Renaissance painting, followed by a 3D render, a scientific diagram, a film still. These are not encountered within separate categories, but within a continuous visual field in which distinctions are flattened. The eye does not pause to classify before moving on. It registers, recognises, and proceeds. Under these conditions, the question of whether something is abstract or figurative begins to feel secondary, even irrelevant, to the speed and fluidity with which images are processed.

This has consequences for how painting is understood. To describe a work as abstract is often to define it by what it is not, namely that it does not clearly depict a recognisable subject. To describe it as figurative is to prioritise subject matter above all else, as though depiction were the primary point of engagement. In both cases, the language simplifies what is taking place, reducing the painting to a single organising principle that no longer holds much explanatory power.

A more precise way of understanding this is to recognise that many paintings now operate through shifts in recognition rather than fixed categories. Forms appear to cohere and then dissolve, suggesting objects, systems, or spaces without fully resolving into any one of them. What might initially read as an object becomes surface; what appears abstract begins to suggest structure. These movements are not incidental but central to how the work functions. They unfold over time, often quickly, and depend on a viewer whose perception has already been shaped by a dense field of prior images.

This is often described, somewhat lazily, as a space between abstraction and figuration. The phrasing is familiar enough to pass without question, but it carries a set of assumptions that are worth examining. It implies that abstraction and figuration remain stable, opposing positions, and that the work occupies a midpoint or negotiates a boundary between them. What it fails to account for is the possibility that these terms no longer describe the field at all, and that the apparent “in-between” is not a bridge but something else entirely.

If we take seriously the conditions under which images now circulate, the distinction begins to look less like a useful framework and more like a residue of an earlier way of seeing. Images no longer arrive as discrete types but as part of overlapping systems of recognition. We encounter them quickly, often without fully resolving what they are, moving between surface, suggestion, and structure without consciously noting the shift. Painting does not sit outside this condition. It is entangled within it, and in many cases, actively engages with it.

From this perspective, abstraction and figuration are better understood not as categories but as effects that emerge in the act of looking. A form may momentarily register as an object before slipping back into paint, or remain stubbornly indeterminate while continuing to suggest something just beyond recognition. These are not stable properties of the work but contingent experiences that depend on duration, attention, and the viewer’s own visual memory.

To continue describing painting through the lens of abstract versus figurative is to fix what is, in practice, unstable. It also allows a certain vagueness to persist, particularly in the familiar claim that a work “explores the relationship between abstraction and figuration,” which often functions as a placeholder rather than a meaningful description. If the terms themselves no longer hold, then the relationship between them tells us very little.

What becomes more useful is a different set of questions. Not what a painting is, but how it operates: how it organises perception, how it manages recognition, how it allows forms to emerge, stabilise, and dissolve. This is where much of the work now takes place, and where the older distinction begins to fall away.

—
Image: Detail from Bless This Holy Bot Mess (2025)

By the time an image appears, you already know how to read it. A still life arrives as “still life.” A cinematic frame carries the weight of every frame that looks like it. A rendered object, however strange, feels familiar because it belongs to a visual language you have already learned.

Even images that aim for rupture tend to fold back into recognition. They are processed quickly, efficiently, and without resistance.

We do not begin with perception, we begin with recognition - and this is what has changed.

Recognition is fast. It allows images to be absorbed, categorised, and discarded almost instantly. It removes the need to dwell, to think, or to ‘work out’. In a visual culture organised around speed, this is not a problem. It is the condition that makes everything else possible.

But something is lost in the process. The possibility that an image might hold us in place, and that it might take time to understand, or fail to resolve altogether. That we might not immediately know what we are looking at. Looking collapses into knowing.

Painting, at its most precise, interferes with this. Not by trying to produce new images, which would simply be absorbed into the same system, but by slowing the moment at which recognition takes hold. It holds forms in a state that is not fully legible. It allows something to feel both familiar and unresolved at the same time. From a distance, a painting might appear stable. Convincing, even. But as you move closer, that stability begins to break. Edges lose definition. Forms shift between object, surface, and gesture. What seemed clear becomes provisional.

This is not ambiguity as style. It is a structural delay. To delay recognition is to reopen the act of looking. For a moment, the viewer is no longer ahead of the image. They are inside it, trying to work out what it is doing, how it is holding together, whether it will resolve or not. This is a different kind of encounter. Slower, less certain, and harder to complete. It also runs against the dominant logic of images now, which is to be understood immediately and moved past just as quickly.

Nothing is seen for the first time. But painting can still make it feel as if it might be.

—
Image: Detail from Tell It To The Firewall (2025)

In the film Event Horizon (1997), directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, there is a line that has stayed with me: “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.” It is framed as a moment of horror, a suggestion that perception itself is about to be exceeded or replaced. The idea is not simply that vision fails, but that it becomes irrelevant.

That line feels less like fiction now than it once did. Not because we are approaching a literal loss of sight, but because the conditions under which images are produced and encountered are no longer organised around human perception in a stable way. Images are made, sorted, and circulated within systems that do not see as we see. They are optimised, filtered, and distributed according to criteria that are not visual in any traditional sense, but statistical, procedural, and predictive. This does not mean that vision disappears, but rather that that it is displaced.

What we encounter as images are already shaped by processes that operate outside of direct human experience. The image is no longer a simple exchange between maker and viewer. It is mediated at every stage by systems that anticipate how it will be received, how it will circulate, and how it will perform. In this sense, the image has already been processed before we encounter it.

This begins to unsettle the idea of perception as something stable or singular. It is no longer clear where perception begins or ends, or who or what is doing the perceiving. The boundaries between human and non-human forms of seeing become increasingly difficult to hold in place. What emerges instead is a distributed field in which perception is shared, delegated, and partially automated.

Donna Haraway’s writing offers a useful way of thinking through this, not as a loss but as a shift in position. Her thinking on situated knowledge complicates the idea of a neutral or universal viewpoint. Perception is always partial, always located, and always shaped by the conditions in which it takes place. What changes now is not that perception becomes partial, but that it is extended across systems that are not fully accessible to us.

The consequence is not simply that we see differently, but that seeing is no longer the primary condition through which images operate. Images function whether or not they are fully perceived. They circulate, they are indexed, and they are acted upon. They produce effects that are not dependent on sustained attention or even recognition. This is where the line from Event Horizon begins to resonate differently. “We won’t need eyes to see” no longer reads as a statement about blindness, but as a description of a system in which vision is no longer central.

For painting, this raises a particular question. If images no longer rely on being seen in the way they once did, what does it mean to produce something that insists on perception? What does it mean to make work that still requires time, attention, and embodied looking within a field that increasingly operates without those conditions?

One response is to resist this shift, to reassert the value of vision as something slow, embodied, and specific. Another is to recognise that perception is already distributed, and to work within that expanded field rather than outside it. Neither position is stable. Both require a reconsideration of what it means to encounter an image at all. If we are moving towards a condition in which images no longer depend on being seen, then the question is not how to restore vision to its previous position, but how to understand what replaces it.

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Image: Image Set (pixel field)

Images are everywhere. They are produced constantly, circulated instantly, and replaced almost as quickly as they appear. The conditions of image-making have shifted from scarcity to excess, and with that shift the terms under which images are encountered have changed. It is no longer difficult to produce an image, nor is it difficult to distribute one. What is less clear is why any particular image should exist at all, or what distinguishes one from the countless others that surround it.

This is not simply a question of quality. The volume of images now exceeds the capacity for meaningful attention. Most are not so much seen as registered in passing, absorbed into a broader field of visual noise before they can be engaged with in any sustained way. Within this environment, visibility begins to stand in for value. An image that circulates is assumed to matter; an image that is seen is assumed to have significance. But these are not equivalent conditions. Circulation is not a measure of necessity. It is a function of the systems through which images move.

Those systems tend to reward particular characteristics. Immediacy, clarity, and recognisability enable images to function efficiently within a fast-moving field. They allow for rapid categorisation and quick comprehension. What is less easily accommodated are images that require time, that resist immediate resolution, or that do not clearly announce what they are. As a result, a great deal of contemporary image production takes place with an awareness of these conditions. Images are made in anticipation of their own circulation, shaped in advance by how they are likely to be encountered.

This has consequences for how images function. It produces work that is legible but not demanding, coherent but quickly exhausted. Such images may operate effectively within the systems that distribute them, but they do not necessarily persist beyond the moment of their appearance. They do not accumulate meaning over time, nor do they require a sustained engagement in order to be understood.

The question that follows is not whether these images are successful on their own terms, but whether they are necessary. In a field defined by excess, necessity becomes a more pressing criterion than novelty or visibility. If an image does not require anything of the viewer, it is unlikely to remain with them. If it does not in some way resist the conditions under which it circulates, it risks becoming indistinguishable from them.

For painting, this question is particularly acute. Painting does not operate under the same conditions of speed or volume as other image forms, and it cannot compete on those terms. Its relevance therefore cannot be grounded in efficiency or circulation. If it is to persist, it must do something that is not already accounted for elsewhere. This does not mean simply looking different, but functioning differently: holding attention for longer than expected, resisting immediate resolution, or constructing an encounter that is not exhausted in a single glance.

None of this guarantees importance. It does, however, shift the terms on which importance might be considered. The issue is no longer how many images can be produced, but which ones need to be. This is not a question that can be resolved in advance, nor is it one that can be answered through intention alone. It emerges through the encounter between the image and the conditions in which it is seen.

If your work disappeared, would anything be lost? It is not a comfortable question, and it does not admit an easy answer. But within a visual field defined by excess, the absence of necessity becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

——

Image: Image Set (Spheres)

Influence is often treated as something visible. Something that can be pointed to, named, and recognised on the surface of a work, such as a reference, a gesture, a palette, or a familiar kind of mark. This is where things start to go wrong. Most artists understand influence as something to be taken, but they misunderstand what is actually being taken. What gets carried forward is often not a way of thinking, but a way of looking. Not a set of conditions, but a set of appearances. Surfaces are easy to inherit. Structures are not.

It is entirely possible to make a painting that looks like something, to echo its language, to reproduce its atmosphere, or to align yourself with its aesthetic, without understanding anything about how or why that language emerged in the first place. The work may feel convincing and may even feel intelligent, but it remains fundamentally unexamined. This is where influence flattens.

Take Pollock. What is often inherited is the drip: the gesture, the all-over composition, the sense of movement across the surface. What is left behind is the set of problems he was working through: the shift away from the figure, the relationship between control and chance, the attempt to construct a different kind of pictorial space. Or Bacon. What circulates is the distortion: the smeared face, the contorted body, the violence of the image. What disappears is the structure beneath it: the spatial frameworks, the use of containment, the way the figure is staged and isolated, the precision of the construction. In both cases, what survives is the look. What is lost is the thinking.

This produces a particular kind of work: painting that performs its influences rather than working through them. The lineage is visible, but only as a surface effect. It signals awareness without demonstrating understanding. It also creates a strange kind of safety. If a work resembles something that is already validated, it borrows a degree of legitimacy. It can be recognised, placed, and absorbed without friction. But that recognition comes at a cost. The work does not need to ask anything new of itself.

The problem is not influence itself. Influence is unavoidable. No work emerges in isolation. But influence that remains at the level of appearance is passive. It reproduces rather than transforms. To take influence seriously is to ask different questions: not “what does this look like?” but “what conditions produced this?” Not “how can I use this?” but “what problem was this trying to solve?” These are harder questions. They do not produce immediate results. They do not lead to quick alignment with an existing language. But they open something up that imitation cannot.

Because resemblance is cheap. You can look like something without understanding anything about it. And for a while, that might be enough. The work might circulate; it might be read as informed, positioned, even sophisticated. But eventually, the limits of that approach become visible. The work begins to repeat itself. The surface holds, but nothing underneath it develops.

What matters is not what artists take, but what they are able to carry forward. Not the image itself, but the conditions that made it necessary. That is where influence stops being something that is copied and becomes something that is thought through.

—

Image: AI-generated image

Painting is still often spoken about as if it begins something, as if it is the origin of images rather than one of their outcomes. This is a comforting fiction. It preserves the idea of authorship, of direct encounter, of the artist standing in front of the world and translating it into paint. But it no longer reflects the conditions in which images now exist. Images do not begin in the studio; they arrive there.

Before anything is stretched, primed, or drawn, the space is already saturated. Screens, references, fragments, visual habits—the residue of thousands of images that have been seen, half-seen, and absorbed. Not just specific sources, but entire ways of seeing that have already been learned. The studio is not empty; it is already full.

This shifts the position of painting quite radically. Painting is not producing images from nothing. It is operating in the aftermath of images that already exist. This is where things become uncomfortable. If painting is no longer primary, then what is it doing? It cannot claim to be the first image. It cannot claim direct access to the world. It cannot even claim innocence.

Most painters are not responding to the world itself, but to images of the world: to visual conventions, inherited compositions, and forms that have already been mediated and processed. Even when working “from life,” the act of looking is shaped by everything that has already been seen. The eye is trained long before the painting begins. So painting finds itself in a different position: not at the beginning, but after the fact. This does not make painting redundant, but it does change its role.

Painting does not need to add another image to the pile. There are already too many, produced faster and with greater efficiency elsewhere. Competing on those terms is a dead end. Instead, painting can work against the conditions that produced those images in the first place:

1. It can slow the image down.

2. It can interrupt recognition.

3. It can reconstruct images through material rather than reproduce them.

4. It can expose how images are built by allowing their construction to remain visible.

5. It can push an image to the point where it begins to break.

This is not about representing the world more accurately. It is about testing how images function, how they hold together, and where they fail.

From this perspective, the idea of the “original” starts to feel less useful. Painting does not need to be the first image to matter. It can be the place where images are reworked, destabilised, or made strange again: a site of delay rather than immediacy, a space where recognition is interrupted rather than confirmed.

There is, of course, resistance to this. The idea that painting comes after the image unsettles a familiar mythology: the artist as origin point, the canvas as site of invention, the work as something fundamentally new. But that mythology depends on ignoring the conditions in which images now circulate. It depends on pretending that the studio is separate from the world that feeds it. It isn’t.

So the question becomes: if painting is not where images begin, what is it for? Not everything needs to be immediately answered. But it is worth asking. Because once painting is understood as working in the aftermath, its possibilities open in a different direction entirely.

Images are scrolled past more often than they are actually looked at.

This is not a failure of the viewer. It is a condition of the systems in which images now circulate. The pace at which images appear, disappear, and are replaced does not encourage sustained attention. It rewards speed, recognition, and immediate legibility. Looking, in this context, becomes procedural. The eye learns what to register and what to ignore. It moves quickly across surfaces, identifying familiar cues. Colour, contrast, composition, subject matter. The image is processed rather than examined. This produces a particular kind of encounter. One that feels like engagement, but is closer to sorting. Images are accepted or rejected in fractions of a second. They are not dwelt on. They are not tested. They are not allowed to unfold.

The idea of the viewer as active and reflective is often taken for granted in discussions of art, persisting as a kind of ideal. A belief that, given the opportunity, viewers will spend time with an image, think through it, and arrive at a considered response. But this assumes conditions that rarely exist. Most images are encountered within systems that fragment attention; social media feeds, online viewing rooms, gallery websites. The frame of the image is rarely stable. It is surrounded by other images, other texts, other distractions. Looking is often interrupted before it has the chance to deepen.

Under these conditions, recognition becomes a dominant mode. The viewer does not need to understand the image in any sustained way. It is enough to recognise its category. Abstract painting. Still life. Sci-fi reference. Digital aesthetic. Once the category is established, the image can be placed and we can move on from it.

This has consequences for how work is made. If an image is expected to function within these conditions, it may begin to anticipate them, causing it to become more immediate, more legible, more resolved. It may offer its meaning quickly, before attention moves elsewhere.

At the same time, there is a counter-position. Images that withhold, resist, or delay recognition by not immediately declaring what they are. They ask for a different kind of looking, one that is slower, less certain, or less efficient. But this raises a problem. If the conditions of viewing do not support this kind of attention, how is the work to be encountered at all?

The question is not simply whether an image is too open or too closed. It is how it operates within the systems through which it is seen. How much it gives, how much it withholds, and when. In teaching, this often appears as a question of clarity. Students are encouraged to consider what the viewer is able to access. Whether the work offers enough to enter into, or too much to sustain interest. Whether it relies on explanation, or allows meaning to emerge through the image itself. But clarity is not neutral either. To make something immediately understandable is to align it with a particular mode of looking. One that prioritises speed and recognition. To resist this is to risk opacity. To slow the image down is to place it slightly out of step with the systems in which it will be encountered.

There is no stable solution to this. What emerges instead is a negotiation between the image, the viewer, and the conditions that structure their encounter. Between what is seen, what is recognised, and what is allowed to remain unresolved.

Looking is not a neutral act. It is shaped in advance. The question is not only what an image shows, but how it is able to be seen.

——

Image: Detail from Plug In, Play Hard (2024)

In The Imagination of Disaster (1965), Susan Sontag describes how science fiction cinema constructs images of catastrophe that are less about destruction itself than about its organisation. Disaster is staged, repeated, and made visible in ways that allow it to be apprehended at a distance.

What is offered is not simply fear, but a structure for containing it. The unfamiliar is rendered legible, and the incomprehensible is given form.

These images do not resolve anxiety so much as translate it into something that can be looked at.

The conditions in which we encounter images have shifted, but this logic persists. Instability, fragmentation, and transformation are no longer confined to speculative narratives. They are part of the visual field more generally. Surfaces shift, forms recombine, images circulate detached from stable origins.

What is striking is how quickly these conditions become familiar. What initially appears strange is absorbed, repeated, and aestheticised. The image does not remain disruptive for long. It becomes something to recognise. This produces a particular tension. Images can suggest instability while remaining highly controlled. They can evoke transformation without relinquishing structure. The unfamiliar is presented, but within limits.

The result is a form of managed disorientation. Enough to register as difference, but not enough to unsettle the terms of looking.

In painting, this raises a different set of questions. How an image can move towards instability without becoming illustrative of it. Whether transformation can be constructed through surface, material, and form, rather than represented as a motif, and how to sustain a condition rather than describe it.

The risk is that instability becomes another style, something that can be recognised and consumed like any other. The more it is repeated, the less it disrupts. What Sontag identifies is not only a feature of a particular genre, but a broader tendency within image culture. Disaster, in her account, is made visible in order to be contained. The question now is whether images can still produce conditions that are not so easily absorbed.

⸻

Image: Still from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), dir. Don Siegel

Paintings are often judged not only by what they are, but by what they are allowed to be.

In critique, this tends to surface indirectly. A work is described as too much, or not enough. Too illustrative. Too abstract. Too resolved. Not resolved enough. The language shifts, but the effect is consistent. Certain possibilities are opened up, while others are quietly closed down.

This is rarely presented as restriction. It is framed as guidance, as a way of refining the work, bringing it into focus, helping it to become more itself. But in practice, it often narrows the field. What begins as a wide set of possibilities is gradually reduced to something more recognisable, more legible, more easily positioned. What is being shaped is not only the work, but the range within which it is permitted to operate.

Over time, this produces a kind of internal editing. Artists learn to anticipate these responses. Certain decisions are avoided before they are even tested. Others are pursued because they are known to be viable. The work becomes more coherent, but also more predictable. This is not simply a question of individual preference or institutional taste. It reflects a broader tendency within visual culture to favour images that can be stabilised quickly. Work that sits comfortably within existing categories. Work that can be described without difficulty.

The problem is not that paintings are discussed, evaluated, or even limited. Those processes are necessary. The problem is when the limits become invisible, when they are absorbed into the work itself and begin to determine what is made. Painting does not need to resolve all of its conditions. It does not need to choose between description and abstraction, coherence and fragmentation, control and excess. These are not oppositions that require settlement, but tensions that can be held in place.

The question is not whether a painting is allowed to do something, but who, or what, is doing the allowing. And what might happen if that permission were withdrawn.

⸻

Image: Soft Crash, Hard Feelings (detail from unfinished painting)

Earlier this week, in an MA crit, we spent some time circling a familiar question. How much should a work give its viewer. At what point does it become too descriptive, too illustrative. And when does it withhold too much, becoming difficult to access.

It is often framed as a balance, as if clarity and ambiguity sit at opposite ends of a scale that needs to be carefully adjusted. But this assumes that all forms of clarity are equal, and that ease of understanding is inherently desirable.

Some images ask very little of us. They resolve quickly. The subject is clear, the intention is legible, and the terms of engagement are established almost immediately. There is little resistance, and little need to spend time with them.

This kind of clarity is often mistaken for success. The image communicates and then leaves nothing else to be done.

But something is lost in the process. When an image can be understood too quickly, there is no reason to return to it. It confirms what we already know, rather than extending or unsettling it. The encounter becomes brief, and the image has no afterlife.

This is not simply a question of individual works, but of a wider visual environment in which images are encountered fleetingly, often in passing, and rarely held in attention for long. Images are scrolled past more often than they are actually looked at. The conditions of viewing are shaped by speed, circulation, and constant replacement.

Within this context, the pressure to be clear is not neutral. It encourages forms that are immediately recognisable, easily described, and quickly resolved. It privileges images that explain themselves.

The difficulty is that clarity, in this sense, is not the same as precision. An image can be highly specific without being fully resolved. It can direct attention, establish relationships, and construct meaning without closing itself down.

Painting has long operated within this tension. Between what is given and what is withheld. Between description and suggestion. The most compelling works tend to resist immediate resolution. They require time, not because they are obscure, but because they remain open.

The question, then, is not how much a work should give, but how it gives it. What is made available, and what is held back. And whether the image allows for a sustained encounter, rather than a rapid conclusion.

An image that asks more of its viewer risks being misunderstood, or overlooked. But an image that asks nothing is quickly exhausted.

Image: detail from Hit Me Up, Calm Me Down (2024)

The studio is no longer just a place of work. It is also an image.

Paint tubes, sketches, books, fragments of works in progress. Arranged, adjusted, carefully framed. What appears incidental is often composed. What reads as documentation is closer to staging.

This is not new. The studio has long been a site of presentation as well as production. The photographs and films of Jackson Pollock by Hans Namuth did not simply document painting in process, but helped to construct a way of seeing it, framing gesture, surface and movement as image. Similarly, the photographs of Frances Bacon in his studio, often staged within a carefully maintained disorder, contributed to a particular mythology of artistic practice. In each case, the studio operated not only as a place of work, but as a space in which the conditions of that work were made visible, and, in doing so, shaped how the work itself was understood.

What is less clear is why these models continue to hold such authority. The figure of the artist they present is specific, historically situated, and far from neutral. It is also remarkably narrow in the kinds of practice it allows to be seen. Yet its image persists, repeated and adapted, often without question.

The pressure to perform a recognisable version of practice does not come from a single source. It emerges through a combination of internal expectation, institutional framing, and the logics of visibility that govern how images circulate. The result is a feedback loop in which artists produce images of practice that conform to what is already legible, reinforcing the very structures that shape them.

What is being constructed is not simply a record of practice, but a version of it. A scene that is legible, believable, and immediately recognisable as “art-making”. The language is familiar. Materials, gestures, traces of process. These elements are brought together not to describe the work, but to stand in for it.

There is a particular kind of clarity to these images. They are easy to read. Everything is in place. Nothing resists interpretation. They confirm what we already expect to see.

But this clarity comes at a cost. The slower, less visible aspects of practice, the uncertainty, the false starts, the parts that do not resolve, are edited out. What remains is a surface that appears complete, even when the work itself is not.

This produces a shift in emphasis. Time and attention move towards the production of images about practice, rather than the work itself. The studio begins to function as a site of image-making in its own right, operating alongside the work and, at times, in competition with it.

The question is not whether these images are constructed. They always have been. The question is what kind of construction they perform, and what they are for. Who is the image of the studio addressed to. What does it need to do. And how much of the work is being shaped in response to that need.

These are not neutral questions. They determine where time is spent, what is prioritised, and ultimately what kind of work is produced.

In painting, this tension is familiar. The still life has long operated as a constructed scene, arranged to be seen. Objects positioned, relationships established, light controlled. What appears natural is anything but.

The difference now is that the staging extends beyond the canvas. The studio itself becomes part of the composition.

The risk is not that the image is constructed, but that it becomes sufficient. That it replaces the slower, more demanding work of making with something easier to produce, and easier to consume.

In Annihilation (2018), directed by Alex Garland, the environment does not present itself as wholly other. It remains, for the most part, recognisable. Trees, water, bodies, light. The forms are familiar, but their relationships are not.

What the film constructs is not an alien landscape in the conventional sense, but a space in which the logic of the image has been subtly reconfigured. Surfaces refract rather than reflect. Structures repeat with slight variations. Matter appears to shift between states without fully resolving into any one of them. The image holds together, but only just.

This is where the film is most effective. Not in its narrative, which tends towards explanation, but in the instability of its visual field. Explanation reduces the image to something far less interesting than it initially proposes. What lingers instead are the moments in which the image resists coherence, where recognition is offered and then quietly withdrawn.

This condition does not rely on shock or rupture. It emerges through a slow accumulation of minor inconsistencies, each of which is negligible in isolation, but difficult to reconcile. You recognise what you are looking at, but cannot fully trust it.

The film draws heavily on natural forms, but these are never simply observed. They appear as though they have been processed, recombined, or passed through another system of organisation. Growth behaves like replication. Pattern substitutes for structure. The result is an environment that feels assembled rather than grown, as if it has been constructed out of fragments of the known.

This has consequences for how the body is understood within the space. It is no longer distinct from its surroundings, but subject to the same conditions. Boundaries become porous. Identity is no longer fixed. The body is treated less as a stable entity than as a site of ongoing transformation, one that cannot be separated from the image systems it inhabits.

What is at stake here is not simply a speculative environment, but a shift in the conditions of perception. The film proposes a space in which recognition is no longer reliable, where images cannot be stabilised through reference alone. Meaning is not absent, but it is deferred.

This has a wider resonance. The instability the film describes is not confined to speculative space, but reflects a more general condition in which images today no longer function as stable points of reference. Environments are encountered as mediated, processed, and recombined, and the distinction between what is observed and what is constructed becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. What is at stake is not simply how we see, but how we decide what can be trusted.

In the studio, similar questions emerge, though under different constraints. How far an image can be pushed away from coherence while still holding together. At what point a form ceases to function as an object and becomes something else. How different visual languages can be brought into contact without being reconciled.

Painting allows these conditions to be constructed deliberately. Forms can be held at the threshold of recognition. Surfaces can suggest depth while refusing to fully describe it. The image can be made to hover, not as a lack of resolution, but as a way of sustaining attention.

What Annihilation reveals, at its most compelling, is not an entirely new visual world, but a reorganisation of one we already recognise. It unsettles perception by working from within the conditions that produce it.

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Image: still from Annihilation (2018), dir. Alex Garland

Some images feel familiar before we’ve even seen them.

Not because they depict something known, but because they seem to arrive already half-formed in the mind, composed out of visual habits accumulated elsewhere. They sit somewhere between memory and invention, as if we’ve encountered them before without being able to say where, or in what form.

I’ve been thinking about this while working on a recent group of paintings. They borrow the structure of still life, with forms gathered and held in relation, but the elements themselves do not quite resolve. They appear assembled rather than observed, as though they belong to different visual systems brought together into a single space, one that holds together but does not fully stabilise. What interests me is not realism as such, but the moment at which something approaches legibility without fully arriving there. The point at which an image hovers between recognition and uncertainty, never quite settling into either condition.

We are used to reading images quickly. We scan, categorise and assign meaning almost automatically. But some images interrupt that process. They introduce a slight delay, in which recognition falters. You recognise the language, but not the sentence, and the gap is difficult to ignore.

That gap feels important. It is where perception becomes visible, not simply what we are looking at, but how we are looking, and the extent to which recognition depends on learned structures rather than immediate understanding.

There is something quietly uncanny in this, not in a dramatic or theatrical sense, but in the way an image can feel both familiar and unplaceable at the same time. It is a condition I have been interested in for a long time, and one that seems increasingly present as the conditions surrounding image-making continue to shift. Within painting, this produces a particular kind of problem. The studio becomes less a site of observation and more a site of construction, in which forms are tested, adjusted and held in a state of near-recognition. The aim is not to obscure them completely, but to keep them slightly unresolved, so that they continue to shift as they are looked at.

I find myself increasingly drawn to that space. Not to resolving the image, but to holding it there, in that moment where it almost makes sense.

Because often the most compelling images are not the ones we understand immediately, but the ones that seem to remain just out of reach.

Image: Detail from a recent painting.