Leonard Sexton’s work lays bare the secret function of painting. In most cultural contexts, painting’s role is to chart cultural shifts and to illustrate its most worthy narratives. Sexton has not foisted these functions onto his shoulders. Instead, his paintings react much like an acutely sensitive meteorological instrument gauged to explore raw emotional responses and inner archetypal questions.

Sexton is not illustrating in a colour by number fashion the figures or land/seascapes he conjures. He leads us to his view of painting as an act of “breathing out”, lungs filled with attacking brush-marks all seeking an unpremeditated revelation of Nature’s light, form and atmosphere. His unkept and challenging layers of muscular marks pre-empt all preconception. Sexton writes, “the paintings are finished when they speak to my subconscious and call out for help or they enlighten”.

By not aiming to simply replicate the pretty optical effects of, say, light on water or the Nature’s hidden underlying structure – that being its ever-changing, indeterminate, gritty, decaying, evolving and regenerating presentations. By sidestepping painting’s typical functions, he explores that special secret function with his barometrically- tuned brushes. In so doing, the whole immense range of Nature’s ambiguities are to be found in the tormented elated voices of Sexton’s paintings.

David Newton