‘Subtext’ is the latest in a long series of paintings of interiors, dating back to the time I first exhibited at Danielle Arnaud, in a group show titled, appropriately enough, Interior Interior. I was very preoccupied with questions of stillness, movement and time in painting then, in relation to film and video, and I was borrowing and experimenting with sequential formal structures derived from those art forms.

I’m still interested in the translation of temporal into spatial logic, but nowadays it is more the time and space of writing and literature in relation to painting that absorbs me. ‘Subtext’ is a kind of epilogue to a group of pieces that I worked on together over a period of four years, very deliberately allowing myself the kind of extended time that, for example, a writer might devote to developing a novel, thinking of the paintings as interlocking parts of a slowly evolving puzzle.

This ‘novel’ is like a house, and rather than narrative or plot, its structure is a drifting movement between rooms, an endless series of entrances and exits. Neither painting or literature are durational in form, but paintings specifically have no beginnings or ends. Like echoes, mirrors and repetitions stop time in a sense, creating loops, glitches in the process of sequential progression. In relation to another dimension of time, the historical dimension, I’m also interested in the anachronic character of painting, its inherent invocation of a persistent ‘pastness’ in the present: like any old house, this one is haunted.

Since the late 1990s Marc Hulson’s work has focused on the development of a densely interwoven lexicon of imagery, organised around a principal of alternation between the spectral and the visceral. Informed by a longstanding engagement with experimental, speculative and supernatural fiction, his paintings and drawings chart a specifically pictorial and personal field of the weird. He also practices collaboratively in diverse fields (moving image, sound, installation, performance) and contributes to the programme at the collective London-based artists’ association and project-space Five Years. His work has been exhibited at public, private and independent galleries in the U.K. and internationally including the exhibitions ‘Saturn’ at Transition 2, London (2019), ‘HOUSEKEEPER’ at Sagacity, Brussels (2018), ‘The Yellow Sleep’ at Kunstverein Heppenheim, Germany (2014) and the national touring exhibition ‘3:AM’ at the Bluecoat, Liverpool. He is an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.