Josh Lilley is delighted to present Afters Forking, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition with British painter Nicholas Hatfull (b.1984, Japan).

Hatfull’s paintings operate in the liminal space between strategy and improvisation. A master of liquid colour, he engineers scenarios in which his imagery and medium contrive to eke out their own agency, entailing an entangled dialogue between artist and surface. He approaches each work as a catalyst for deviation, stretching the possibilities of painting in the search for a point of duality between abstraction and recognition.

His paintings engage imagery pulled from films, Boro textiles and the artist’s daughter’s drawings. They flicker like celluloid, casting afterimages like fading projections. They are frayed and sutured like fabric, humming between reverie and intent like a child’s scribbling. Hatfull seeks to fragment and dislocate his subject matter until it begins to phase in and out of the picture plane, an accumulation of forms passing through the labyrinth of process until it reaches a floating balance.

Hatfull skilfully manipulates his layers, mediating the suavity of oil with the frankness of gouache, cultivating surface shift and directing bleed. He guides liquid to uncover hidden pathways in his compositions, his facture one of careful temporisation, redacting forms and restoring them, fragmenting and absorbing. Chronology and perspective become flattened, leaving a space of diffusion in which rests an anchor or two of association, like the memory of a dream, a jigsaw on a riverbed.