“Everything of mine you see in the gallery is improvised,” he continues. “What happens is subject to chance, and my reaction to the suggestive elements of what paint does when it’s pushed. It’s constantly evolving. I’ve been interested in archaeology since I was young - the poetic side of it, where you take back the earth and something emerges. My painting is similar to that process, although I’m adding materials: the poetry is when something comes out which you wouldn’t have calculated.”

“Of course I have a history of tendencies, a library of techniques, and it would be easy to rely on them. But there’s a degree of violence in what I do, because I want to prevent a formulaic output: it only becomes interesting when I rupture those techniques. There’s one of the paintings in the gallery that shows just that.”

We wander back to the gallery, and he shows me a square seascape (see right) where most of the canvas is composed of rough, worked on, textural oils and gold leaf, but the bottom section is uniform, smooth, inky blue. “That’s where I poured some car paint on top of what I’d already done,” he says. I’m amazed, and immediately get his allusions to violence. Pouring car paint onto such a carefully textured canvas is akin to vandalism. But it works. It fits. It adds an extra dimension to the piece.