Draft 1
My practice presents a unified vision of painting where technical form, spiritual order, and narrative purpose converge. Rejecting mere imitation or decorative effect, I integrate line, color, and luminosity into an inseparable language capable of expressing both the visible splendour of creation and the interior realities of human existence. My work functions across three distinct registers: the pastoral, exploring light, landscape, and natural harmony; the social, offering both critique of modern decay and a vision of transcendent restoration; and the existential, giving tangible form to the full spectrum of human passion, fear, and suffering. Ultimately, my studio practice bridges visual delight with moral weight, treating the painted image as an active site of truth and profound meaning.
Draft 2
My work operates as actionable philosophy—a deliberate assertion that visual art is neither mere egocentric self-expression, empty decoration, nor a game of disinterested formal pleasure. Trapped between a progressive art world that reduces the canvas to political power dynamics and a reactive traditionalism that retreats into cold, mathematical hyper-formalism, contemporary painting has suffered an eclipse of meaning. Both extremes banish human essence and universal visual legibility from the studio. My practice seeks a way out of this gridlock through a Catholic Metamodern return to reality.
Grounding my studio practice in Thomistic hylomorphism and High Scholasticism, I approach figurative painting not as historical nostalgia or superficial copying, but as the pursuit of substantial form. The line is not an idol for Cartesian rationalism or geometric dominance; it is a humble, sensory instrument deployed to capture the organic weight, breath, and existential dignity of creation. Color is not a separate, mechanical calculation, but a living, psychological language inherently wired into human consciousness.
Rejecting the Kantian divorce between appearance and ultimate reality, my work re-anchors the canvas in St. Thomas Aquinas’s objective criteria for beauty (pulchrum): integritas (wholeness), consonantia (proportion), and claritas (radiance). Working with traditional methods and materials—preparing grounds, studying under master traditions, and submitting to the direct observation of nature—translates theoretical clarity (ratio) into disciplined studio habits.
Ultimately, I view the artist as a craftsperson (techne) whose duty is to bring physical form to truth. Rather than engaging in the interminable debates of post-Enlightenment skepticism, my goal on the canvas is simple: to make the essential form of reality legible again, creating work that speaks clearly, beautifully, and directly to the human soul.
June 2026 – Materia e Fantasia at Coffee wake cup gallery solo exhibition
June 2026 – Alpha.1 online exhibition
April 2026 – Paultalk residency
March 2026 – Selfridges JW Anderson window with Topolski studio interview
2025 – Marylebone alfies antiques, more still lives
2024 – Marylebone alfies antiques, paintings some still lives
2023 – Paul-talk youtube channel feature
2023 – Residency in the Loire Valley
2022 – Residency in the Loire Valley
2022 – Chinon, Val de Loire, some still lives
2020 – The empty gallery youtube podcast
2018 – New Cross conspiracies Lewisham art house
2018 – Folkestone brick and mortar gallery Meanwhile an Interim Exhibition
2017 – Cambridge cambridge arthouse Liminal
2017 – Folkestone the factory, it’s cold, are there heaters? leave them be, we deserve it, oh,
2017 – Folkestone the factory gallery handover,
Education
2015 – Farnham Campus, Surrey – Degree Show
2014 – Vienna fourworks gallery nowness
2014 – KunstakademieWien VIenna Erasmus
2014 – Folkestone Georges house gallery probably not
2014 – Farnham Black box gallery Bread Entropy
2014 – Farnham Black box gallery Wunderkammer
2013 – Farnham Black box gallery Panopticon 3.0, isolation chamber, Cola shower
2013 – Farnham Linear gallery panopticon 2.0
2013 – Farnham Linear Gallery panopticon 1.0
2013 – Hoxton the rest is rust and stardust 402 arches gallery
2012 – Studied at UCA Farnham
2011 – Studio show Coutada Portugal
2011 – Residency Portugal
2011 – Wimbledon degree show, wonderland illustrations
2010 – Studied at UAL Wimbledon
Media features
2025 – The decadent serpent podcast feature
2024 – The decadent serpent
2023 – The muse commands 1 and 3 2023
2023 – The mallard 2023
2022 – Paul-talk YouTube channel
2021 – Personal Youtube channel
