Mark Mullin's new paintings are packed with luxurious forms and vivid often thick audacious colour. His paintings teem with an energy and vibrancy that is associated with the artists’ oeuvre. Mullin's recent body of work investigates how abstract painting can perform as a type of playful narrative of contradiction and subversion. It is a dialogue whose visual vocabulary is comprised of borrowed bits and parts – a convergence of “insistent debris” where the decorative and minimal negotiate with the brash and flamboyant. What results are paintings that resonate like improvised abstract theatre. It is the study, contemplation and rummaging through various types of debris that has pushed Mullin’s paintings to this point: - the oddities floating in the corner of a harbor, the bits of conflicting things entwined in the fence after the storm winds recede, the comical matter seeping through his studio roof on sweltering days. Through various paint application methods these unexpected combinations occur in the canvases with an impact that is layered and seemingly incompatible. Thin washes of stained colour, softly blended voluminous forms and bulky thick paint, sometimes push beyond the perimeter of the canvas, both nestle and wrestle to evoke the vulnerable, foreboding and ridiculous.