Justin Mortimer

His paintings explore a human world where depravity and desecration seem a matter of course. Dark, nameless environments are occupied by figures witnessed in circumstances of physical threat and psychological distress, surrounded by sinister machines, medical apparatus and the evidence of conflict. These paintings are loaded with ambiguities surrounding their cause and context and consistently invite us to question the relationship between subject matter and content. While the imagery is almost exclusively pitiless, the texturing of the paint, the play between light and shade and the passages that lead from photo-realist definition to near-abstract formlessness are so sensitively handled as to make the work at least partially redemptive as well as to indicate a key philosophical dimension: the oblique relationship between evidence and interpretation.