Something draws you in but you can think of no earthly name to describe what you see and you are not at all sure how wise you would be to go there. For a moment you wonder if you have stumbled into the aftermath of a wholesale slaughter – a slaughter so atrocious that even the sky (if that is what it is) looks like something straight off the butcher’s slab. But the plot thickens with every next glance. You couldn’t look away now even if you wanted to. By this stage the terrible and the beautiful elements of the scene are making equal claims on your attention. How can it be that something so apparently beyond the pale has been cast in such a reverential light, has been laid out before you with such loving care? It is as if the dragon’s teeth were being presented to you on a velvet cushion.

Clare Chapman’s paintings occupy a liminal realm that no-one else has thought to go to, let alone explore (and – so daunting is it – one that most of us will feel relieved that we only need visit by proxy). They have the oblique fascination of a series of glimpses of the outer limits of the collective unconscious. The terrain they describe is pointedly indeterminate: existing in a perpetual suspension between night and day, between the living and the dead, between coming into being and putrefaction. All foreground and background with nothing in the middle, embalmed as they are in an always failing light, if these highly suggestive works are not quite abstract, neither are they exactly representational. They simultaneously draw on a rich pictorial tradition – in particular a long and distinguished line of fleshly probers and ravishers running from Rembrandt and Rubens to Bellmer and Bacon – while distorting it to the limits of the recognizable. What is more, in tracing a line across the blisters and cavities, the lurid dilations and the sickly darkenings of any given sequence of these amorphous, phantasmal still-lifes, there is this gathering sense of painting as a whole undergoing a painful but necessary paroxysm, of it turning itself inside out in order to reform itself before our eyes. In the final analysis, the work puts forward an argument – as forcefully convincing as any currently being made – of the continuing vitality of the painted image.