John M F Casey

Born near Dartmoor in 1981

"'Both the colour paintings and the monochromes are usually conceived during a recurring mood state, where anxieties and deliriums are channelled into a creative instinct. The art practice therefore relies on a philological process, and more resembles a condition than a vocation, with both psychotic and neurotic characteristics. The psychoses being the explosive phases of creation, and the neuroses being the long subdued periods between: where the ideas incubate within the subconscious. The subject matter of the work - which includes executions, orgies, satanic imagery and hallucinogenic nightmares - is drawn from the compulsive studies and meditations of the neurotic phase. The work swims with allusions to poetic, historic or philosophic subjects, sometimes with depictions of recognisable personages, with allegorical symbols, or with carved fragments of verse or prose. This sits uneasily with the crude and perverse aspects of the paintings, which is reflective of the primordial id that favours obscenity, farce and destruction.

This nauseating confusion of reference the strands of multifarious cultural sources interwoven arbitrarily with personal experience and nonsense - give an interesti...