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STATE OF PLAY:

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This show has been a year in the making, 14 months to be exact, from when Tanner Ewing and Josh Papa first met to discuss State of Play. For his latest body of work, Papa has embraced a stream-of-consciousness approach, moving instinctively from thought to canvas. The results are layered, unfiltered, and unmistakably of the moment. His paintings absorb the anxieties and urgencies of 2025—conflict, politics, migration, the race to Mars—while simultaneously tracing the more intimate, happy rhythms of daily life.

 

What emerges is a practice balanced on the knife-edge between turbulence and joy. Papa’s canvases toggle between melancholy and levity, between chaos and order, between the heaviness of world events and the buoyancy of spontaneous doodles or bursts of color. That ambiguity is the point. Each painting invites the viewer to ask, Am I looking at serenity or discord?

 

The answer, inevitably, is subjective, dependent as much on the audience’s state of mind as on the imagery itself. Deliberately open-ended, the exhibition resists fixed narrative. Instead, it becomes an active space for projection and interpretation, where playfulness coexists with unease and where meaning is never prescribed. The largest works on display, ‘Kingdom IIl ’and ‘Painful Bliss ’each took 3-4 months to complete. The earliest work on display, ‘Pond’ is intentionally framed to resemble an old master. Papa took a very classical subject matter and interpreted it in his manner.

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ARTIST BIO:

 

British-born and now London-based, Josh Papa, who also works under the name Deluded Animal, has roots in New Zealand and grew up in Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Amsterdam. This global upbringing informs the eclectic and layered nature of his practice.

Papa’s work explores narrative, symbolism, and a modern reinterpretation of a fresco. Drawing from history, contemporary culture, and personal myth-making, he creates vibrant scenes populated by expressive, hybrid creatures. These figures serve as vessels for open-ended storytelling, blurring the line between the absurd and the allegorical.

Working with bold color and intricate detail—often set against deep black grounds—Papa builds compositions that revel in contrast: playful yet unsettling, chaotic yet precise, ancient yet undeniably current. His paintings operate like visual folklore, dense with imagery that rewards close looking, inviting viewers into worlds where imagination and memory entwine, and where surface playfulness often conceals more complex undercurrents.