Navigating Abstract Terrain in Contemporary Consciousness
Steven Asquith’s artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of abstraction, material experimentation, and psychological inquiry, forming a body of work that is as intellectually rigorous as it is emotionally resonant. Based in Melbourne, Asquith operates outside the confines of traditional artistic categories. His work is not easily defined by medium, style, or movement; instead, it functions as a kind of visual anthropology—an ongoing investigation into the textures, tensions, and traces of contemporary life.
At the core of Asquith’s practice is a commitment to exploring the psychological and material residue of the urban condition. His works are not simply visual compositions but experiential fields—spaces where the viewer is invited to engage not only with what is seen, but with what is felt. Through a diverse and often unconventional range of media—spray paint, enamel, acrylics, industrial markers—Asquith constructs layered surfaces that speak to the fragmentation and overstimulation of modern existence.
His compositions are built through processes of accumulation and erasure, inscription and void. They are marked by a tension between control and spontaneity, between the deliberate and the accidental. This dialectic reflects the complexity of contemporary consciousness: fractured, nonlinear, and shaped by competing forces of memory, media, and environment. Asquith’s work does not offer a singular narrative or message. Instead, it opens up a space of ambiguity—where meaning is provisional, where interpretation is fluid, and where the viewer becomes an active participant in the construction of significance.
In this way, Asquith’s abstraction is not a retreat from the world but a method of engaging with it more deeply. His paintings and works on paper are attuned to the rhythms of the city, the noise of the digital, and the quiet turbulence of the inner life. They are meditations on presence and absence, on what is revealed and what is withheld. Through his practice, Asquith invites us to navigate the abstract terrain of contemporary urban consciousness—not to find clarity, but to dwell in complexity.
Formal Language and Material Intelligence
Steven Asquith’s work is grounded in a meticulous yet intuitive engagement with form and material. His paintings and works on paper are not constructed through traditional figuration, but through a process of formal inquiry—an exploration of how surface, gesture, and absence can coalesce into meaning. His compositions emerge from a dynamic interplay of mark-making and negative space, where each element is in dialogue with the others, creating a visual tension that is both deliberate and alive.
The materials Asquith employs—spray paints, acrylics, enamel, and Posca markers—are drawn from the visual vocabulary of the street. These are not neutral tools; they carry cultural weight, evoking graffiti, protest, and the aesthetics of urban resistance. By bringing these materials into the gallery context, Asquith challenges the hierarchies that separate “high” art from vernacular or subcultural expression. His work becomes a site of convergence, where the raw energy of the city meets the contemplative space of the studio.
This material intelligence is not merely about surface effects. It is about how materials can carry meaning, how they can speak to histories of place, identity, and resistance. The marks in Asquith’s work often feel unearthed rather than applied—scratches, scrawls, and ghostly traces that suggest acts of erasure as much as inscription. These gestures evoke an archaeological sensibility, as if the canvas were a site of excavation, revealing layers of time, memory, and emotion.
Asquith’s abstract language does not aim to depict the world, but to echo its fractured sensibility. His compositions are expressive yet restrained, emotional yet methodical. There is a sense of control in the chaos, a structure beneath the spontaneity. This duality gives his work its power—it feels both immediate and considered, both visceral and cerebral.
In this way, Asquith’s formal experimentation becomes a mode of inquiry. It asks: How do we make meaning in a world saturated with images? How do we navigate the tension between expression and erasure, between presence and absence? His work does not offer definitive answers, but it opens up a space for reflection—on material, on form, and on the complex realities they seek to articulate.
Psychological and Emotional Landscapes
In series such as Storm Concepts, Steven Asquith reimagines the landscape not as a depiction of geography, but as a mirror of the mind. These are not tranquil vistas or idyllic countrysides; instead, they are charged atmospheres—turbulent, brooding, and emotionally saturated. The storm, a recurring motif, becomes a potent metaphor for the psychological weather of contemporary life. It stands in for inner unrest, cognitive dissonance, and the ambient anxiety that permeates our hyper-connected, overstimulated world.
Asquith’s approach draws on the legacy of Romanticism—particularly the emotive power of artists like J.M.W. Turner, who used weather and light to evoke the sublime. But where Turner’s storms were natural phenomena imbued with spiritual grandeur, Asquith’s are psychological constructs rendered through a post-industrial, post-digital lens. His clouds are not meteorological but metaphorical—visualizations of mental turbulence, social fragmentation, and existential drift.
The materials and techniques he employs—spray paint, layered acrylics, gestural scrawls, and strategic voids—contribute to this sense of emotional intensity. These are not passive images; they are active fields of tension. The layering of media mimics the layering of thought, memory, and emotion. The repetition of marks suggests obsessive rumination, while the use of negative space evokes absence, silence, or psychological blankness.
In many of these works, the “landscape” becomes a kind of mental cartography. The canvas is transformed into a map of the psyche—its peaks and troughs, its storms and stillness. These are not places we can visit, but states we can inhabit. They speak to the internalized experience of living in a world where the boundaries between self and society, between perception and reality, are increasingly blurred.
Asquith’s psychological landscapes do not offer resolution. They are not therapeutic or redemptive. Instead, they hold space for complexity, for contradiction, for the unresolved. They invite the viewer to confront their own emotional terrain—to recognize the storm not as something “out there,” but as something intimately familiar, something within.
Rhythm, Repetition, and Sampling
Steven Asquith’s work pulses with a rhythmic sensibility that bridges the visual and the sonic, the formal and the improvisational. His compositions are not static arrangements but dynamic fields of movement—spaces where repetition becomes a form of resonance. Drawing from the lineage of modernist abstraction, Asquith retools its formal strategies through the lens of contemporary urban culture. The result is a visual language that feels both grounded in art history and deeply attuned to the textures of the street.
There is a distinct musicality in the way Asquith constructs his surfaces. Patterns emerge like sampled loops, slashes mimic percussive beats, and punctures act as syncopated silences. These gestures recall the aesthetics of hip-hop production, where fragments are reassembled into new wholes, and graffiti, where repetition and rhythm are embedded in the act of tagging. His process is performative—each mark a trace of movement, each layer a record of time. The canvas becomes a site of action, where the body’s gestures are preserved as visual echoes.
This approach is exemplified in his 2019 exhibition 2 Rips & Puncture Marks, a series of minimal yet emotionally charged works that explore the aesthetics of damage. Here, Asquith uses tearing, scraping, and incision not as acts of destruction, but as methods of inquiry. These marks suggest interference, erosion, and vulnerability—visual metaphors for the wear and tear of urban existence. Yet, despite their rawness, the works are not chaotic. They are carefully composed, meditative in their restraint, and deliberate in their disruption.
What emerges is a tension between control and spontaneity, between structure and entropy. Asquith’s use of repetition is not mechanical but expressive. It mirrors the rhythms of the city—its cycles of construction and decay, its patterns of movement and interruption. His work captures the pulse of contemporary life, not through representation, but through rhythm. It invites the viewer to feel the beat beneath the surface, to sense the tempo of a world in flux.
In this way, Asquith’s abstraction becomes a form of sampling—not just of visual motifs, but of cultural memory, sonic texture, and urban experience. His paintings are not just seen; they are felt, heard, and inhabited.
Abstraction as Language
In his 2023–2024 series Analogue Pictures, Steven Asquith deepens his exploration of abstraction by embedding it with linguistic, semiotic, and cultural references. The title itself—Analogue—is a deliberate provocation. It gestures toward a resistance to the digital regime that dominates contemporary visual culture, where images are compressed, optimized, and endlessly replicated. In contrast, Asquith’s analogue approach emphasizes the tactile, the imperfect, and the materially continuous. It is a return to the hand, to the gesture, to the trace.
But “analogue” also functions metaphorically. It suggests translation—not only between digital and physical, but between languages, between cultural frameworks, and between the internal and external dimensions of experience. In this sense, Asquith’s abstraction becomes a kind of code: not a cipher to be cracked, but a system of signs that invites interpretation without demanding resolution.
The works in this series resemble glyphs, scripts, or speculative alphabets—visual forms that evoke ancient writing systems or diasporic calligraphies. They are not legible in the conventional sense, but they carry the weight of meaning. Their ambiguity is intentional. These are not illustrations of language, but language itself abstracted—fragmented, reassembled, and reimagined.
This semiotic layering reflects Asquith’s engagement with diasporic identities and global narratives. His marks are not just aesthetic decisions; they are acts of memory, of cultural negotiation, of personal and collective inscription. In a world saturated with hyper-legible, algorithmically curated imagery, Asquith’s work resists readability. It asks the viewer to slow down, to feel rather than decode, to intuit rather than interpret.
In doing so, Analogue Pictures positions abstraction not as a retreat from meaning, but as a deeper engagement with it. It proposes that language—like identity, like memory—is not fixed but fluid, not singular but plural. Asquith’s abstraction becomes a space of translation, where the visual and the verbal, the personal and the political, the ancient and the contemporary all coexist in dynamic tension.
A Contemporary Meditation
Steven Asquith’s practice occupies a vital space in contemporary art, not merely for its aesthetic innovation but for its intellectual and emotional resonance. His work exemplifies how abstraction can serve as a critical tool—not to obscure reality, but to interrogate it. In an age defined by overstimulation, algorithmic curation, and the commodification of attention, Asquith’s paintings resist the demand for instant legibility. They slow us down. They ask us to look again.
Rather than offering escapism, Asquith’s abstraction confronts the viewer with the textures of contemporary life: the fragmentation of identity, the erosion of certainty, the psychological toll of urban and digital environments. His compositions are not decorative; they are diagnostic. They map the invisible forces—emotional, social, technological—that shape our inner and outer worlds.
What distinguishes Asquith’s contribution is his ability to hold space for ambiguity without collapsing into incoherence. His works are rigorous yet open-ended, structured yet intuitive. They do not deliver messages; they cultivate atmospheres. They do not tell stories; they evoke states of being. In this way, his paintings function as emotional and perceptual environments—spaces where viewers can project, reflect, and recalibrate.
In a cultural moment increasingly dominated by clarity, speed, and surface, Asquith’s work is a quiet act of resistance. It demands attention, patience, and presence. It invites discomfort—not as a provocation, but as a necessary condition for deeper engagement. His paintings are not answers, but questions. Not declarations, but meditations.
Ultimately, Steven Asquith’s art reminds us that abstraction is not a retreat from the world, but a way of re-entering it—more sensitively, more critically, and more imaginatively.
Material, Perception, and the Unfinished Image
Steven Asquith’s paintings occupy a compelling and complex terrain where materiality, gestural abstraction, and perceptual ambiguity intersect in a state of constant negotiation. His work is not easily categorized within the confines of traditional art historical movements; rather, it emerges from a deeply personal and philosophical engagement with the act of painting itself. At its core, Asquith’s practice is rooted in the understanding of painting as a temporal, embodied, and phenomenological process—one that resists closure and invites an ongoing dialogue between artist, material, and viewer.
Embodied Perception and the Phenomenology of Seeing
Asquith’s approach to painting is grounded in the lived experience of perception. His canvases are not simply visual compositions but experiential fields that unfold over time. This emphasis on temporality and embodiment aligns his work with the phenomenological tradition, particularly the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is not a detached act of observation but a bodily mode of being-in-the-world. It is through the body that we encounter and make sense of the world around us.
In Asquith’s paintings—especially those in the Ghosts of the Thrill series—this philosophy is made manifest. The gestural marks, smudges, and layered textures are not merely aesthetic choices; they are traces of the artist’s physical engagement with the canvas. The painting becomes a record of movement, of presence, of time. The viewer, in turn, is not positioned as a passive observer but as an active participant in the unfolding of the image. The work demands a slow, attentive gaze—one that is attuned to nuance, to subtle shifts in tone and texture, to the interplay of light and shadow.
Process, Temporality, and the Aesthetics of Becoming
The temporal dimension of Asquith’s work is not limited to the act of viewing; it is embedded in the very process of making. His paintings are constructed through a series of iterative gestures—layering, scraping, revising, and partially erasing. This process-oriented approach results in compositions that feel provisional, as though they are caught in a state of becoming rather than being. The image is never fixed; it is always in flux, always on the verge of transformation.
This sense of perpetual becoming resonates with the principles of process philosophy, particularly the work of Alfred North Whitehead, who argued that reality is not composed of static substances but of dynamic events. In this light, Asquith’s paintings are not objects with fixed meanings but temporal fields in which multiple temporalities—past gestures, present perceptions, future possibilities—coexist. The Analogue Pictures series exemplifies this ethos, with its layered surfaces and subtle tonal shifts suggesting a continuum of change and reinterpretation. Each layer is both a residue of the past and a foundation for what is yet to come.
The Sublime and the Limits of Representation
Asquith’s refusal of resolution extends into the affective and philosophical dimensions of his work. Many of his paintings evoke a quiet, contemplative sense of the sublime—not the dramatic, awe-inspiring sublime of Romanticism, but a more intimate, destabilizing encounter with the limits of representation. This aligns with the postmodern theories of the sublime articulated by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-François Lyotard. For Lyotard, the sublime arises when the mind is confronted with something that exceeds its capacity to represent or comprehend—a moment of cognitive rupture that opens onto the unknown.
In Asquith’s abstract compositions—characterized by veils of translucency, fragmented gestures, and zones of silence—this experience of the sublime is palpable. The paintings do not offer clear images or narratives; instead, they gesture toward something just beyond the grasp of language or form. The Storm Concepts series, with its turbulent, abstracted landscapes, uses the metaphor of nature not to depict but to evoke—to suggest psychological states, emotional intensities, and existential uncertainties that resist articulation.
Revealing and Withdrawing: Heideggerian Aletheia
This dynamic of emergence and concealment finds further philosophical resonance in the writings of Martin Heidegger, particularly his concept of aletheia, or truth as unconcealment. For Heidegger, the work of art is not a vehicle for communication or representation but a site in which something comes into presence through a process of revealing and withdrawing. Asquith’s paintings participate in this poetics of disclosure. They do not assert meaning; they allow it to hover, to flicker into view, to recede again.
In the Ethereal Variations series, this tension between presence and absence is especially pronounced. The interplay of light and shadow, of visible gesture and obscured trace, creates a visual rhythm that invites contemplation. The viewer is drawn into a space where meaning is not given but must be patiently uncovered—where the act of looking becomes a form of thinking, and where the image is never fully present but always in the process of becoming.
Multiplicity, Flux, and the Post-Structuralist Turn
Asquith’s openness to ambiguity and multiplicity also aligns his work with post-structuralist theories of meaning. Thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze challenged the idea of fixed or hierarchical meaning, proposing instead a model of interpretation based on difference, deferral, and proliferation. In this framework, meaning is never stable or singular; it is always contingent, always in motion.
Asquith’s paintings embrace this instability. They are not symbols to be decoded or narratives to be followed; they are open-ended structures that invite multiple readings. The absence of figuration is not a negation but a strategy—one that frees the viewer to engage with the work on their own terms. The Joy Hallucinations series, with its vibrant, shifting forms and chromatic intensity, exemplifies this approach. The paintings do not dictate meaning; they generate it through the viewer’s engagement, allowing for a multiplicity of interpretations that are never exhausted.
Material Agency and the New Materialist Turn
The materiality of Asquith’s surfaces plays a crucial role in this process of meaning-making. His use of pigment, texture, and unconventional materials such as Posca pens and spray enamel foregrounds the agency of matter itself. In line with the new materialist turn in contemporary theory—particularly the work of Jane Bennett—Asquith’s practice challenges the traditional hierarchy between concept and material. Paint is not inert or subordinate; it is active, agential, performative.
The artwork emerges through a process of negotiation between the artist and the material. This mutuality complicates any simple account of authorship or expression. The painting is not a product of intention alone; it is the result of an intersubjective event in which the properties of the material shape and are shaped by the gestures of the artist. The Storm Concepts series, with its dynamic interplay of media and surface, highlights this relational ontology of making.
Spatial Poetics and the Aesthetics of Absence
Throughout his practice, Asquith demonstrates a profound sensitivity to space—not only the spatial logic of composition but the spatiality of absence. His paintings often feature areas of emptiness, silence, or restraint that are as significant as the marks themselves. This approach echoes principles found in Japanese aesthetics, particularly the concept of ma, which refers to the meaningfulness of the interval or the space between things.
Rather than filling the canvas, Asquith allows it to breathe. The empty zones are not voids but active elements that shape the rhythm, tension, and emotional resonance of the work. This spatial restraint, combined with the visible traces of impermanence and process, evokes the ethos of wabi-sabi—an aesthetic that values imperfection, transience, and the beauty of the incomplete. The Analogue Pictures series, with its delicate balance of form and emptiness, embodies this sensibility with quiet elegance.
Painting as a Site of Perceptual and Philosophical Inquiry
Steven Asquith’s paintings operate across multiple registers—material, temporal, affective, and philosophical. They are not didactic or declarative but meditative and open-ended. In refusing closure, they remain vital, continually unfolding with each act of viewing. They do not present an image so much as a condition: a space in which thought and perception might meet, and where meaning is not delivered but discovered, not fixed but continually remade.
In this way, Asquith’s work offers a powerful model for thinking about painting not as a static object but as a living process—a site of inquiry, encounter, and transformation. His canvases invite us to slow down, to look again, to dwell in the space of the unfinished image. And in doing so, they remind us that the most profound experiences of art are not those that offer answers, but those that open us to the richness of uncertainty.