Mel Gooding talks to painter Andrew Bick on the occasion of the recent exhibition School studies: Ghosts, Arguments at Hales Gallery, London.  

Bick comments: " I think I’m actually interested in what I would call contradictory space, in the sense of something that becomes visually unfathomable, or is a conundrum, something that can’t quite be resolved in one stage of looking at it. Going back to how you [Gooding] describe the earlier work, there was in fact a self-conscious desire to block off or direct the viewer’s process of looking at it or looking into it, and this later evolved into a later stage in which there was actually an invitation to ‘look in’, but in which at all times the viewer was encouraged to be aware that the painting was made out of real things, real physical layers, rather than illusions."