Nigel Mullins’s works, from Chaotic Region (2013) and beyond, present the disparate images of human existence as a compendium of fruitless tropes that have perpetrated, sustained and perpetuated Western culture since the 18th century. The works draw every sacralised view and arch-theory into question. Even the designation ‘human’, with its defining sets of ideologies, has become an obsolete remnant, exposing every pedagogue and hero, every defining character as, at the very most, ineffectual. The paintings reflect the enveloping totality of contemporary culture and posits it clearly as a deadlock between past and present.

His painterly exploration makes use of sumptuous impasto, veering between figuration and abstraction without restraint, the lashings of paint (both sensual and viscous) conveying the turmoil and restlessness of our times. Mullins applies his material as libations covering a sacred artefact or an amulet: fetishistically. The paint, dense in meaning and referential value, thickly covers the support as it alters and constructs. This explicitly references the painting as a thing; a support to which meaning (as material) is applied often in layers and over an expanse of time. It is not that the thick patinas of paint have no regard for the frame, and thus no consideration for the delineations of border. Rather, they recognize the boundaries specifically, some even bare their marginalia, titles and subtexts as physical ‘charms’ suspended from below. Every painted mark, like the wiry phrases affixed to the frames of the paintings is a litany petitioning nothingness and a no one.

The insistence of the materiality of paint exposes the frame-laden subtexts. It recognises these as definitive entities, rich in cultivated meaning. The medium treats them physically in the same way that it treats the subject matter. With the sensual gesture and drama of paint application, Mullins’s work then finally turns on the paint itself and exposes the sedimentary material as concomitant to the myths of Western civilisation. It is the vehicle and medium that imagines our underlying desires, hopes and fantasies – the futility of its so-called gains.