Topographies

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'Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.'-​

Samuel Beckett, 'The End' (1946)

 

In Michael Broughton’s Self-Portrait, Half-length (2024) the small, dark dot of the artist’s right eye occupies his face like an aperture, perpetually open to a world of restless light. Even his face looks wide open, a dish for receiving signals. His left hand dissolves before it exits the edge of the painting, his coat a set of glints and shadows that hang chunkily from his torso, the background a grey approximation of space and time. Broughton’s eye opens, light floods in, becoming a kind of substance that bounces around his perceptive faculties, intermingling with his thoughts and memories. His right hand hangs like an eviscerated organ, raw and twitchy, ready to transform light into something tangible, something new. His eye is less an aperture than a two-way valve, the site where world and self dissolve into one continuous substance.

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Before he enters his studio to paint, Broughton finds a spot outside, often a familiar one in Hackney, and sketches in charcoal. He places himself in front of scruffy, everyday vistas, overlooking garages, the back of a school, a pub, a patch of plane trees, some rough corner of anywhere. The day, whatever it brings, starts flowing freely into that small aperture, animating his hand. He looks, but he doesn’t simply see, attempting to reproduce visual experience on the paper, or not exactly. Marks coalesce into forms, as his hand pushes and drags a piece of charcoal across the bumps and crevasses of the landscape as if it were a tombstone upon which he makes a rubbing, conjuring a topography of time. Look at the drawing Study from Sutton Court (2024), a disquieting swirl of monochrome, the bins and buildings depicted as if softened by erosion, resembling a sketch of weathered stones on a cliffside. Even as marks darken to describe space and shadow, there is an overall sense of flow and continuity.

 

Contrast the painting From Sutton Court (2024) to the Study. The painting doesn’t depict the world as a camera might, naively, as if eyesight were a passive interpreter of the world, but suggests instead that experience emerges from a hallucinatory flux. Broughton depicts this corner of Hackney as a way to meditate on the significance and instability of any viewpoint. The interlocking forms resemble a Suprematist abstraction, but portrayed as if under the surface of a trickling river, a geometric vision distorted by the flow of time. I was reminded of Jeff Wall’s Diagonal Composition (1993), a photograph of a timeworn sink, a patchwork of different surfaces – composed, like Broughton’s From Sutton Court, to emphasise the contingency of any perspective, the transcendent beauty of overlooked spaces. All imagery, all knowledge, is haphazard. Broughton has plucked a metaphysical proposal from behind the bins.

 

Broughton paints as if he’s transcribing dashes of light that had built up in his consciousness as a kind of substance – a substance that maps, temporarily, a Heraclitean flux, as phenomena shimmer and shift into being. The painting becomes a kind of residue of that experience. Looking at Garages with Tree (2024) [122 x 153 version] the viewer might feel in the presence of a cityscape that cascades into the distance, culminating in sky, and yet we also see a uniform surface, a skin across the body of time. Though the painting depicts a traditional landscape, with foreground and background, the most immediate experience of looking at the work is its surface: lumps and ridges of paint, of light shifting across pigment. A smaller painting of the same subject (and same title) shows an almost identical composition, in a similar palette, with a few more clouds in the sky. Broughton’s paintings are not tableaus or idealised viewpoints, but act more like journals, a daily habit of recording one’s existence. Although worlds away in appearance and outcome, Broughton’s approach reminds me of On Kawara’s date paintings. Where Kawara depersonalises his message through depicting only data, recording the brute fact of his presence on the planet as both an objective date and an abstraction, the idea isn’t dissimilar. Both artists offer a way to declare: here I am, still alive, reckoning the day. Both profess art as a habit, a practice, a way to acknowledge the simultaneous wonder and the mundanity of one’s existence.

 

Visiting Broughton’s studio, our conversation turned to the perennial subject of paintings that defy the label of figurative yet are manifestly not abstract. Disappointed by this seemingly irresolvable bind, I mentioned Philip Guston’s quip that the words abstraction and figurative should be banned so that we would all look at pictures freely, without categories. And Broughton responded with the comment that John Ruskin thought that 'subjective' and 'objective' among the worst words in the dictionary. It’s an observation, almost as grumpy as it sounds, that Ruskin makes to start his essay on 'Pathetic Fallacy', in Modern Painters III. While Ruskin was dealing with a different problem – the Romantic habit of attributing emotion to nature – connecting the insights of Guston and Ruskin helped illuminate Broughton’s work. Ruskin rejects the idea that blue is merely a sensation that exists in a subject when they look at the sky (and thus a thing that exists only in apprehension of it), nor some kind of immutable thing out there in the world, but rather that the sky has 'the power of producing that sensation’. Both Guston’s quip and Ruskin’s argument suggest we eliminate these binary categories: there isn’t a world, objectively knowable, which art tries to interpret either accurately or emotively. (I confess to playing a bit loosely with Ruskin’s idea – he does rank poets based on how much they sully their descriptions of nature with overblown human emotion.) There is, instead, an endless back-and-forth between the two, a sense of continuity between the outside world, and its power to produce sensation, and the two-way valve of our perceptive faculties.

 

When Broughton sits outside, eyes open and charcoal in hand, he seeks a subject, an experience to which he can respond. Not necessarily to describe the world, but to acknowledge one’s existence, to announce to himself and to the world that he’s still here, just around the corner somewhere in Hackney, and ready to set down in unruly paint the wild interplay between sensation and consciousness. In the manner of Kawara’s date paintings, Broughton’s landscapes assert for both artist and viewer the glorious impossibility of seeing the world through any filter but the one offered to us by the time and place we happen to inhabit. Hans-Georg Gadamer calls this our 'prejudice'. Not a pejorative label, implying judgement, the term offers a way to acknowledge the limits of the temporary horizon we all occupy – its blend of memory, tradition, history, sensation, immediacy. Contingency filters everything we perceive. A limitation, to be sure, yet one we might celebrate.

 

Hence the importance of repetition for Broughton. Look at the multiple paintings titled Fire Escape. The relatively large Fire Escape (2025) has a chunky presence, yet unstable, as if the earth beneath the buildings is an undulating liquid. The painting conveys a strong sense of gravity, as if the buildings were ageing bodies struggling to maintain their posture, with the black zig-zag of the fire escape a wobbly thunderbolt of ascension. Yet the windows lodged unsteadily in the buildings also offer synecdoches of infinite, cheerful blue. In a smaller version of the same subject, Fire Escape II (2024), the buildings look stronger, asserting themselves as blocks of solid mass, even though the painting as a whole shimmers with shifting, fugacious light. As a viewer, you move around this painting and watch as its internal weather shifts with each change in perspective, the light glinting off ridges of paint, or swallowed up by matte patches. The landscape, the fire escape, the sky, all have the power of producing sensation, and this is what Broughton recreates in the studio. The compositional structures of music are also touchstones for Broughton – he talks about musicians standing to the side, becoming an almost passive presence, permitting the music to speak through the artist. When Broughton chooses a vista every morning, the landscape becomes a score that he plays with charcoal. He opens the small, dark dot of his eye and flashes of light rush in like notes, caesuras and slurs, animating his fleshy hand.

 

Despite its diminutive size, the painting Morning Lane (2025) conveys a kind of immensity. The artist’s brush is too big for the painting, elides any detail, smears the surface with memory and sensation. There’s a tellingly ambiguous passage of paint to the right of the building that frames the left side of the picture, a triangle of shadow that, from moment to moment in the act of apprehension, either sits back as darkened space or asserts itself as a patch of a beautiful swampy green. The tiny landscape conveys a melancholy, but also a sense of celebration – or perhaps a celebration of melancholy, of repetition. Despite the straightforwardly descriptive title, I couldn’t help but detect a pun, 'Mourning Lane', or even a reminder of W.H. Auden’s 'a lane to the land of the dead' from the poem 'As I Walked Out One Evening’. Consisting of driving quatrains with flamboyant rhymes, Auden’s poem describes an urban landscape haunted by ghosts, a land possessed and propelled by the flow of time’s 'deep river'. In Broughton’s painting, a film of pigment oozes across the surface, the landscape transformed into a consistent substance that flows in all directions. The painting hangs on the wall like a day condensed into a raindrop.

 

Broughton’s paintings of the writer and curator Andrew Dempsey, Andrew Dempsey II, Andrew Dempsey, Folded Arms (both 2024) and Andrew Seated, Window (2025), possess a radiance equal to any in his oeuvre. Just as Broughton’s landscapes don’t attempt to portray Hackney’s terrain, his Dempsey portraits don’t attempt to capture the sitter’s essence or character, even though the subject is manifestly recognisable. Dempsey’s eyes are always averted, looking down or away. Faint and shifting gestures describe his eyes – a quick, diagonal line becomes an eyelid, a dash of white the sitter’s silvery brows. His body, likewise, doesn’t appear entirely at rest, not entirely corporeal. The viewer might feel in the presence of a paradox: the painting is thick and fleshy, a palimpsest of moment-to-moment decisions, as palpable as another body. And yet the painting presents a window into a world that looks surprisingly immaterial. Broughton depicts Dempsey as an ephemeral accretion of light, plucked from the flow of time. If we can’t step into the same river twice, the world renews itself whenever we open our eyes. Broughton approaches the same landscape, the same river of time – twice, ten times, countless times – with an aperture open to every ripple of light. Every perspective is contingent, every painting a new version of the world. Never the same river, never the same artist.

 

Craig Burnett 2025