Chris Heaphy's new show, Everyday Life, has a remarkable fluidity about it. Richly coloured pours of acrylic are pushed and pulled over the teeth of Belgian linen with terrific confidence – with a degree of facility you'd expect after three decades of painting. His visual vocabulary, including Maori heads, birds and feathers is present still, but is now part of the wider fabric of the painting itself – part of the fluid dance between painted ground and material support. Spatulas have pulled paint both horizontally and vertically, sometimes when wet, sometimes when a little drier. And the motifs of bird and vase have been treated with great consideration, sometimes integrated with that which surrounds them, and sometimes quite deliberately not. The feeling is almost other-worldly. But the man's an angler, a conjuror of dreams – so we would expect this, of course.

JS

Press release courtesy Jonathan Smart Gallery.