Richard Walker Dismantles His Unstable Paintings

Staged at the recently opened CORPUS in Cambridge – a rare and welcome example of a serious commercial gallery in the English provinces – Richard Walker’s solo exhibition ‘All These Moves’ has a cloistered, intellectually searching spirit that feels appropriate to this university city. The Scottish painter centres his practice on his Ayrshire studio, which serves not only as a place of production but also as a recurring presence in his idiosyncratic, demanding yet deeply compelling paintings. If this suggests he is working in the tradition of, say, Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio (1855) or Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911), then the truth is considerably more complex. 

It is worth noting Walker’s process in detail. Having blacked out his studio windows, the artist – a former scenery painter for Scottish Opera – assembles ‘sets’ made from cloth, timber, cardboard, mirrors and stray detritus. Next, he illuminates them with multiple lamps and data projectors, which cast glowing, often digitally distorted images (film stills, found photographs, reproductions of paintings from art history and his own body of work) onto their surfaces and the surrounding space. Alone in this crepuscular environment, Walker then paints what he sees, working wet into wet in oils and acrylics on modestly sized wooden boards, now and then making adjustments to his light sources and sets and completing each painting in a single, fiercely focused session. 

Is all this process apparent from simply looking at his work? In short, no. Night (2024) is a landscape-format, putty-coloured monochrome within which is embedded an offset, portrait-format composition featuring a creamy ‘X’ against an espresso-brown ground, abutted by what looks like an abstracted depiction of an archaeologist’s specimen tray filled with excavated bones. Such a painting is impossible for the viewer to mentally reverse-engineer without prior knowledge of the artist’s very particular method. Yet this matters only if we misunderstand his purpose, which is surely to discover, in our image-saturated world, visions that feel authentically strange and to alert us to the fundamental instability of seeing. 

Sink (2025), perhaps the most legible work in the show, seems to depict precisely what its title suggests, but the uncanny play of shadows over the porcelain and steel, plus an encroaching wash of bloody red, gives this unremarkable studio fixture a noir-tinged, nightmarish quality. In Dark (2022), two fields of black – matte on the left, glossy on the right – are bisected by a chocolatey vertical brushstroke that tentatively suggests the edge of a door or window frame. An object seems to be coalescing against the richer darkness, picked out in filigreed white and yellow marks. Is it a gleaming brass monstrance? Some elaborate, cut-glass vessel? Maybe it’s nothing more than a scrambled image issuing from a beam, whose dimmer details have been absorbed into the artist’s set. In Plato’s Republic (c.375 BCE), Socrates describes a group of prisoners shackled in a firelit cave, whose only knowledge of the world comes from shadows projected on its wall. Walker, I imagine, would contend that these pitiable detainees have much to teach us about the nature of reality. 

The show also features several large paintings, among them 1d (2021), composed of sections of jigsawed wood that have been individually painted, then assembled like marquetry. Also based on the artist’s studio sets, these works, though lacking the intensity of their smaller counterparts made in a single session, possess their own unsettling charge. The technique allows different painterly speeds and registers to inhabit the same image, in a manner that would be impossible on a uniform support. For Walker, it seems that painting – and indeed the act of seeing – is something that must be taken apart before it is put back together. 

Richard Walker’s ‘All These Moves’ is on view at CORPUS, Cambridge, until 20 December 

^{Main image: Richard Walker, ‘All These Moves’, 2025, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and CORPUS, Cambridge; photograph: Stephen James}