A Ghost Sits Chanting

Matthew Bateson & Tim Darach

7 – 22 June 2025

Private View Saturday 7 June 3 – 6pm

Matthew Bateson

My recent work starts in a very open, abstract and exploratory way: just pushing the paint around, allowing forms to evolve and interact and letting different colours resonate and bleed into each other. There is no pre-planning or guiding under-drawing to map the terrain.

At some point, the abstract painterly process begins to pervade the spaces. Accidental marks and a strata of residual pigment establishes a ground. Spectral contours of a particular landscape or figurative form emerge alchemically from within the materiality of the paint.

Tim Darach

I’d like to say this about the paintings and myself:
“In the magical distance, emerge. These paintings.
Cross sections/abstraction – like sculptures sawn – simplified.
A hunter’s mask. A spectre, apparition, spirit, a vision of second sight. Faces in the smoke.
Father and son.
Is there a new adventure about to start?
Characters sprawled at the roadside waiting to become carnival players or maybe about to enter an endless labyrinth?
So many possible worlds, fragmented, stuck.

I remember the feeling of oneiric impossibility marooned at the top of the ladder you had to climb to get into my dad’s studio in Battersea, unable to make the traverse through the trapdoor onto the studio floor.
I’ll never see through that child’s eye again.”