My various works have touched on painting endgames, mutations of the grid, decorative excess, and the interweaving of process and abstraction. Since the early 2000s I have consistently used processes of visual layering to yoke an open-ended improvisatory painting style to fragmentations of signage and text.

My recent paintings use repeated pouring in conjunction with masking, to collage together a condensed crowd of visual events. Scything blocks of colour collide with fluid transparent veils and remnants of stylized information. Transitioning through a succession of states, each painting compresses its elements to a point where their fragments become co-dependent. In this way the paintings work through a series of impulses, riffs, accidents, false starts and changes of mind, to arrive at a moment of dynamic complexity that can’t be planned. The visible shards of signage in the paintings refer the viewer to a digital realm that flows restlessly and centrifugally.

This vocabulary is extended in the newer works through the incorporation of photo images into the picture plane. These images – taken in the studio, showing working materials and painting detritus – evoke a practice figured as a process of consumption and production. The works on show extend my painting idiom of simultaneous accident and deliberation, code and mark, excess and synthesis.

• https://palfrey.space/exhibitions/