Fergal Styles is interested in painting and drawing as image-making. For a long time, he felt he could only move in the latitude provided by abstraction. Then slowly, space and more specifically interior space, began to emerge. He drew quiet empty rooms. These made way for larger spaces and became inhabited by figures and forms. Gradually, the space became large enough to reflect a wider spectrum of his own imagination. The work accommodates existential human concerns, the history of painting, lofty aspirations – and a multitude of transient specific interests. His work eschews precision in favour of an indexical use of colour – whose centrality to the work cannot be overstated or much explained. He utilises a wide variety of media in attempt to breach the picture plane and in extension, the dream-like nature of reality. He values the informal, the gestural, the expressive and the improvised. Yet somehow, whether by force or by habit, things do reoccur. There are motifs. The vitality of the work resides in its playfulness, its irreverent material landscape, and its willingness to embrace failure.