Each painting involves a multilayered process in which intricate, hand-applied techniques intermingle with the artist’s idiosyncratic source materials. For these paintings, as in many of his previous works, Carver began working on unstretched linen canvases. In addition to drawing upon a range of art-historical sources, from Medieval manuscripts to sculptures by Rodin, and Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Carver continues to incorporate imagery and diagrams sourced from the world of medicine. An ultrasound scan, for example, points to the role of contemporary imaging technologies in an analysis of the body, an idea further alluded to by translucent elements that appear as ghostly figments or objects penetrated by x-ray vision. Instructional diagrams for medical machinery in the underpaintings, meanwhile, compositionally inform these new works. To these Carver has applied techniques including mono-printing and frottage, whereby the form of an absent object has been insinuated by direct transfer or by rubbing, as well as painterly interventions that introduce shadowy recesses, or highlights by way of bright impasto strokes. The canvas, or skin, is then stretched over a frame. 

The first room of the exhibition comprises what the artist refers to as the ‘Inferno’ or ‘Fire’ paintings. Inspired by the 14th-century first canticle of The Divine Comedy ‘Inferno’, Carver takes the text’s journey downward through the nine circles of hell as a means to consider the place of the body in the social, political, and metaphysical worlds. Burning entails a ‘phase change’, in the artist’s words, and aside signalling transformation, this process of de-materialisation emphasises the illusionistic and effervescent quality of these works. The ‘Inferno’ paintings are compositionally underpinned by medical diagrams of a skin-graft mesher, a surgical device that imparts a mesh-pattern to skin grafts so they may cover larger surface areas of burn victims. It is as though Carver has taken his own metaphor of painting-as-skin to literal ends, while also referring to the ‘Frankensteinian effort’ of his thinking and process. In Effigy (2024), the titular painting, three horizontally stacked figures appear enveloped in vivid red and yellow flames. With their facial expressions suspended between distress and ecstasy, they evoke the many figures represented in Biblical iconography, as well as the artist’s own ‘religious fervour for the discipline of painting.’ Turned outward, their gazes implicate the viewer as witness to scenes of hellish torment, a concept that extends to Indifferent Eye (2024), a painting based upon the layout of an operating theatre and features a tangle of limbs and spectral figures in soft brushwork, all being swallowed up by a beast. The exhibition’s triptych [The Devoted, Phase Transition, and Hollow Fire] (all 2025) behaves as a transition piece that connects the paintings of the gallery’s two rooms, and sees a procession of figures parading across its panels as they burn and dissipate into the surrounding landscape.

The gallery’s second room houses a series of what Carver calls the ‘Landscape’ or ‘Air’ paintings that are, notably, purged of obvious human presence. Although these atmospheric works initially seem to behave as salve or respite from the conflagration of the previous room, titles like Primitive Accumulation (2025) and All That Is Solid (2025) refer to Marxist texts, and reaffirm Carver’s preoccupation with a pervasive biopolitical and social violence. Here, the flowing lines that run across the compositions are also taken from medical diagrams, in this case for air-circulation systems used to produce sterile air in operating theatres, a sanitisation measure particularly important for burn victims to avoid bacterial infection. Atop these drawings, which behave as a cartographic base and structural skeleton for the compositions, Carver took elements from the ‘Inferno’ paintings and traced them onto sheets of paper, which he then used as guides to poke holes with needles into foam core, once again employing frottage to transfer the spectral rubbings of the dot-matrixes onto the canvases. The result is palimpsestic landscapes or archaeological sites that suspend human traces and fragments, in which neither over- or underpainting, figure or ground, is privileged. 

Across both new series of works in ‘Effigy’, Carver engages the limits of figural representation and aesthetic genres whose signs may be grafted into and onto the pliant, metaphorical skin of painting. Within the space of sublimation offered by artistic practice, Carver’s epic scenes of brutality reflect an anxiety-riven ‘desire to reject the centrality of the human figure, transcend it, eradicate it’. While elsewhere a biopolitical tool or social construct, the body in Carver’s purview becomes raw material for a transgressive painterly approach and sustained interrogation of ‘the ethics of representation’.