In Spicy, full and smooth, the studio reveals itself as a set of pink and red liver-like organs, doing the work of the painting and visually animating the surface.

Taylor has explored previously how artists create voices and characters to keep them company in the isolation of the studio, and this work expands into a notion of prophecy based on the spectacle of ventriloquism who was believed by Ancient Greeks to speak on behalf of the dead from within the stomach. Like another ancient divination Haruspicy (inspection of entrails) Taylor dissects the body of his own ideas allowing him to discover more organs with which to make sense of his studio practice.

Taylor creates his paintings, cut-outs and installations through a long process of drawing, painting, scratching, piercing and cutting the surface. His thick layers and multiple narratives reveal an inner world of personal stories and fictional characters, developed over time in the realm of the studio. The painting is oil on linen and a close inspection reveals the archaeology of this canvas over the artist’s revisitings of many years, which has been scored, scraped to the weave as texture or fallen in places into holes: some of which restitched, others left as dark voids.

Taylor sometimes describes his studio as a stomach: a swilling and churning dual sphere of production and consumption, where all that enters is incessantly gnawed, singed and regurgitated, and where his inner world of personal stories and fictional characters, develops. His paintings emerge over several years through a process of painting and re-working until the final iteration rises to the surface. Sometimes abstract, sometimes bearing reference to figures or forms, internalised fictions rise and external influence seeps in.

“I like to think about paintings coming from this dark space, set amongst the hypnagogic dark and dank terrior that represents the ambiguity of the creative process. A place, fizzy with habits and indecision, where practice and method become redundant, and in their place the monstrous and all that is unidentifiable seep. Bad habits, good habits, objects made from boredom, from damage and internal mutterings. The kinds of actions and behaviours that belong to the margins of your day, where you pick and scratch, wait and stare, allowing your attention to be removed from the matter at hand. A place in which in-built fictions can intermingle, morph, and collide, and maintain the hallucinations, patterns and images that unlock the biological happenings and evolutionary knowledge that the artistic journey encapsulates - where a work might ‘happen’”.

Ross Taylor (b. 1982, Harrow, London) lives and works in London and completed his MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art, London, in 2008. In 2018 he was selected as artist-in-residence at The Edward James Foundation, and between 2015-16 was The Abbey Scholar in Painting at the British School at Rome, Italy. Recent exhibitions include, Shoulder pipe forgiveness claw, Larsen Warner, Stockholm, 2021; The decorator always gets paid least, Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, 2020; Rattus Rattus, Galerie Russi Klenner, Berlin, 2020 and The studio at 4am, Hastings Contemporary, East Sussex, 2020.