Shadow Work: Matt Coyle

Andrew Sullivan presents painting as an investigative act. Not simply an exercise in representation, but a means of probing the invisible architecture of existence. His works unfold like visual equations; each canvas an accumulation of data points gathered through intuition, observation, and lived experience. Answers, if they exist, remain concealed within the surface—a vessel for questions that don’t always necessitate resolution. 

He believes that painting can become a profound way to experience life, to the point where the two become inseparable. This conviction—that the visual can reach beyond the limitations of language—underpins Nightly, Daily. For Sullivan, this origin stretches back to the first marks made on cave walls. It is a lineage of human expression that has evolved alongside our innate capacity to imagine and enquire. His own practice is a continuation of this ancient impulse, translating thought, memory, and emotion into layers of symbols, forms, and colours. They become his vocabulary with one essential purpose: to communicate what words cannot.

Sullivan attempts to traverse multiple dimensions at once. He moves between inner and outer landscapes, mapping the tension and dialogue between conscious reasoning and the submerged territories of his subconscious. Some works resemble a scientist’s chalkboard mid-formulation, dense with interconnected elements: fragments of stories, moments of prophecy, fields of geometry. Others suggest journeys through psychic terrain: descents into chaos, slow returns to light, passages marked by both destruction and renewal.

In one work, a frog ascends the fine line between the conscious and subconscious, dissecting an anatomical head from a children’s pop-up book. In another, a sea dragon drifts through an ocean in outer space. Figures and creatures reappear as recurring markers, each holding fragments of meaning, yet resisting singular interpretation. The artist’s own life becomes entwined with the imagery, as paintings begun in reflection seem to foreshadow experiences yet to come.

Sullivan’s imagery functions as a living archive of inquiry. Animals, celestial symbols, geological forms and weather systems are arranged like constellations; each painting a navigational chart without fixed coordinates. Like the anatomical layers of printed acetate in a children’s encyclopaedia, his paintings encourage us to peel back his surfaces to find other structures: oceans that are also dreams, landscapes that are also the mind, creatures that move between unmappable worlds. 

In Sullivan’s hands, painting becomes a sustained act of contemplation: a way of making visible the inexplicable currents that shape both our external world and the mind’s terrain. Resolution is rare, but perhaps that is the point. Do the answers exist somewhere in the very questions we ask ourselves, or is it the act of seeking which brings us closer to understanding what it is to be human? Sullivan asks us to stand at the threshold between clarity and ambiguity, and to recognise that sometimes, the most profound discoveries are found in the space between the two.