Introduction
My recent practice (Figure 1) continues to develop from the ideas I explored through psychorealism—a way of painting that goes beyond surface appearance to reveal emotional truth. In these works, I examined the emotional distance and tension that exist within human relationships. I have been interested in how emotion can be projected through the body—how gestures, posture, and spatial arrangements reveal unspoken psychological states. While this still remains central to my practice, I have also begun to place more focus on the background—the environments that surround the figures, and how space itself can hold or reflect emotion.
This shift came naturally through painting. I began to notice that the sense of alienation or intimacy I wanted to express often lived not only in the figures but in what was happening around them—the architecture, the colours, the light. The city became a psychological site in itself, shaping the inner states of those who inhabit it. This relationship between people and their surroundings has deepened my interest in the emotional structure of urban life.
Laura Grace Ford’s Savage Messiah has been an important influence in this development. Her writing and drawings reveal the city as a living map of memory, anxiety and resistance. Reading her work made me think about how the city could enter my paintings not just as a backdrop, but as an emotional landscape. The background, for me, is no longer secondary; it carries psychological weight, almost like another presence within the composition.
My current work also builds on my previous engagement with the ideas of Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff. Their concept of psychorealism looked into the inner mechanisms of the subconscious, while my approach explores how those emotional undercurrents surface through lived experience—how emotion can be traced through the social and spatial realities that surround us. Through this, I continue to use painting to explore the shifting distance between inner and outer worlds, between the self and the city.
Collecting Fragments from Everywhere
The works I presented in the MA Fine Art Show (2025) (Figure 2) extended my ongoing exploration of psychorealism—an attempt to translate emotional experience into visual form through figures, gestures, and environments. The large painting from the show depicted a tense, ambiguous encounter between several figures. I was interested in how power, protection, and vulnerability could exist within the same scene, expressed through bodily posture and spatial compression. The work became a reflection on human distance and authority, but also on empathy—how these emotions can overlap and blur.
This comment led me to look more closely at artists associated with Neo-Expressionism, particularly Jörg Immendorff and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose practices explore the relationship between personal emotion and collective experience. Both artists use expressive distortion and symbolic environments to comment on social behaviour, identity, and psychological instability. In Immendorff’s Café Deutschland I (1978) (Figure 3), the crowded interior becomes a stage where ideology and personal tension collide—the figures appear trapped within a social performance that reflects the divided psyche of post-war Germany. The image reflects the political and psychological turmoil that is embedded in post-war German life. This is demonstrated in the chaotic style of the image, reflected in the busy atmosphere of a disco and a bar composed as one (abarnett20, 2016). The work helped me reflect on how the background in my own paintings can act as a psychological field, carrying invisible pressure and collective emotion rather than merely situating the figures.In Immendorffs paintings he uses influences from both his personal life and greater German Culture in tumultuous large-scale acrylic and oil paintings that borrow staging and composition from the theatre (abarnett20, 2016). Similarly, my compositions often carry a theatrical quality, as if the figures are performing quiet psychological dramas within constructed spaces.
Basquiat’s Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (1982) (Figure 4) has also been significant for me. This artwork showcases his use of graffiti style and through his use of jagged lines he was able to produce figures with identifiable key elements. Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump artwork are similar to his other artworks since the skeletal boy’s hair is three-pointed. This depicts black people as kings and the freedom they enjoy even in their simple lives (Jean-michel-basquiat.org, 2025). The chaotic street scene, full of heat and motion, conveys both joy and alienation—a moment of connection that feels fleeting and unstable. His graffiti-like marks and gestural language transform the urban wall into a site of emotion and resistance. This piece appears simple and enigmatic, yet so multifaceted at the same time, as if we were supposed to be left with a mystery to ponder later. The motif of this artwork conveys messages about social issues, including slavery and racism in New York and the United States in general (Schulze, 2025). This has influenced my approach to surface and material, encouraging me to think of texture and gesture as carrying social and emotional resonance rather than simply visual form. The use of a johnnypump as a focal point is significant–it is a symbol deeply rooted in the urban landscape of New York City, where Basquiat lived and worked (De Souza, 2024). Basquiat’s use of the johnnypump as a symbolic focal point resonates with my own way of translating personal emotion into spatial language. Like him, I often start from lived experience and reshape familiar surroundings based on how I feel inside. His transformation of an urban object into an emotional symbol mirrors my interest in turning ordinary environments into psychological spaces that reflect inner states. In both Immendorff and Basquiat, I find a balance between personal narrative and collective tension, a dynamic that continues to shape my understanding of psychorealism and its dialogue with the city.
The graffiti-like quality that appears in both Basquiat’s work and my own interests me not only as an aesthetic gesture but as a psychological and social language. Graffiti, by nature, exists between visibility and erasure—between the desire to be seen and the risk of being covered, ignored, or overwritten. This tension reflects the kind of emotional uncertainty I often try to capture in painting. The marks that resemble graffiti in my work are not direct imitations of street art, but rather echoes of that unstable visibility. They suggest voices that want to speak but remain partially hidden, emotions that surface briefly before dissolving back into the background. For me, this visual language bridges private reflection and public expression, embodying the blurred boundary between inner emotion and collective experience. Similar to art, graffiti is also a form of expression and freedom (Tran, 2018). It can challenge dominant structures by drawing on collective experience and local identity, revealing how social life can be imagined beyond hegemonic systems (Evans, 2025). In this sense, the graffiti-like marks in my paintings operate as traces of resistance as well as emotion—gestures that speak both socially and psychologically.
My new work Safe Haven (2025) (Figure 5) continues this direction but expands it into a more symbolic and socially charged space. The inclusion of the words “positive” and “negative” also reflects my ongoing interest in language as an emotional code—how words can both reveal and obscure feeling. These opposites act as emotional markers, reflecting the polarised states that define social interaction. In the centre, a small dome enclosing a fragile tree suggests containment and the attempt to protect something pure within chaos. The inclusion of spray paint enhances this sense of urban tension—its graffiti-like surface connects to public expression while retaining a private, psychological tone. Through these developments, I have come to see my practice as a form of psychological mapping—where emotional and social traces coexist on the same surface. The feedback from the MA Fine Art Show (2025) encouraged me to be more conscious of how material, colour, and scale affect not only what is seen, but also what is felt. What remains visible in the painting is only part of the story; the rest lives in the traces, the spaces, and the silence between figures—the things that are left behind.
The Foundation of My Haven
My work continues to develop from the framework of psychorealism, which has shaped how I understand painting as a space for translating emotional and psychological states into form. The term was first used by Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff to describe their dialogue between psychoanalysis and surrealism (Pailthorpe et al., 2019, p.11). Building on what I explored in my previous study, I have been returning to the ideas of Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff—not to restate their theories, but to reconsider what their approach means for me now.
What still fascinates me about their work is the way they treated painting as both expression and inquiry. Their process of annotating, recording, and analysing images suggested that emotion could be studied through the act of making (Pailthorpe et al., 2019, p.11). I find that idea still relevant, though I have started to see it from a different position. Instead of using automatism and symbolic abstraction to access the unconscious, I approach the psyche through observation and lived experience. My work begins with the emotional tone of encounters—small social gestures, fragments of memory, or quiet tension between people—and translates them into visual language. This process of translating emotional experience has led me to think differently about spatial relationships in painting.
This shift has changed how I think about space in my paintings. I am interested in how emotion and distance take form within shared environments—how a room, a street, or even a body might carry traces of unspoken feeling. In this way, psychorealism becomes less a fixed theory and more a way of working that allows emotion, memory, and atmosphere to overlap. The painting, for me, is no longer just a reflection of inner states but a site where private and collective experiences quietly meet and leave their marks.
The urban environment has become central to how I think about the emotional and psychological dimension of space. In Savage Messiah (2011), Laura Grace Ford maps London through fragments of memory, anger, and loss—revealing the city as a psychic terrain charged with social residue. Ford describes the work as “a gigantic, unfinished collage, which—like the city—is constantly reconfiguring itself” (Ford, 2011, p. 14). Its mix of photographs, typeface text, and drawings creates a temporal dissonance—“out of time, which is not to say out of date”—reflecting the unstable nature of lived experience (Ford, 2011, p. 14).
This page (Figure 6) from Savage Messiah (2011) reflects Laura Grace Ford’s way of translating social change into emotional language. The combination of protest text, hand-drawn portraits, and grey urban photographs creates a sense of agitation and loss—a visual noise that speaks of lives displaced by redevelopment. The fragmented composition and protest-like typography highlight the social and psychological residue embedded within the urban landscape (Ford, 2011, p. 14). The words “LOFT LIVING VICTIMS OF FUTURE CRIMES” carry both irony and anger, suggesting how aspiration and destruction coexist within the process of urban transformation. The image feels unstable, layered with personal memory and collective frustration.
As she writes, “The movement between anonymity and encounter can be very quick in the city. Suddenly, you are off the street and into someone’s life-space” (Ford, 2011, p. 13). This oscillation between distance and proximity encapsulates the emotional tension I seek to explore in my own work. For Ford, the city becomes “a site for drift and daydreams, a labyrinth of side streets and spaces resistant to gentrification” (Ford, 2011, p. 12)—a terrain of resistance and re-animation.
Her practice, as Jacques (2019) notes, “maps flashpoints of contestation, not in an attempt to archive, but to recreate them,” using psychogeography as “a strategy to destroy walls and fences” and to reveal gentrification as “a reworking of the Inclosure Act 1773”—a continuation of class and spatial control. As Pietropaolo (2023, p. 127) observes, Savage Messiah counters the “surface narrative of the regenerating city” by documenting London through walking and immersion, turning the act of movement itself into a form of emotional witnessing.
I relate to this sense of the city as both archive and stage: a place where emotion is stored, replayed, and re-animated through everyday encounters. Like Ford, I treat the city not as backdrop but as a living, unstable environment that mirrors psychological tension—a space where the personal, political, and emotional continually overlap.
- This connection between walking, memory, and emotion also recalls Michel de Certeau’s reflection in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984):
“To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place — an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City…a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.” ― Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984, p.103)
This sense of being in constant movement—of searching for a place while never fully belonging—resonates with how I understand my own practice. My art practice begins with personal reflection, capturing the emotional changes and perspectives I go through at different points in my life. I try to see the world through my own eyes, reshaping scenes based on how I feel inside. Whether these moments are small and subtle or profound and life-changing, they give me a way to understand my emotions and how I relate to the world around me. Painting, for me, becomes a way of walking—a form of navigation through shifting emotional and spatial terrains. It allows me to trace the instability of belonging, to build a sense of place through movement, memory, and perception.
Michel de Certeau also offers a way of rethinking how we inhabit such environments. His idea of “walking as a form of writing” suggests that our movements through the city are acts of meaning-making—small, improvised gestures that resist fixed structures (Michel de Certeau, 1984, p.97-99). This perspective helps me to see painting as a similar process of negotiation: each composition becomes a record of emotional navigation, a visual rewriting of experience within the structures that contain it.
- This relationship between movement, perception, and emotional space forms the foundation of my exploration into psychodrama, re-animation, and memory.
In my recent paintings, I have become increasingly aware of how the composition operates like a stage—where figures enact quiet psychological dramas through gesture, posture, and distance. The idea of psychodrama helps me to understand painting not only as representation but as a site of enactment. As Jacob L. Moreno defines it, psychodrama “employs guided dramatic action to examine problems or issues raised by an individual or a group,” facilitating “insight, personal growth, and integration on cognitive, affective, and behavioral levels” (ASGPP, 2024). Each figure becomes both actor and witness, caught within emotional tension that mirrors real encounters. In this sense, my paintings function as psychological theatres, where emotion unfolds through movement and space.
Lisa Yuskavage’s Triptych (2011) (Figure 7) can be understood through the lens of psychodrama, where the body becomes a site of emotional performance. As Yuskavage herself explained, the process behind these works was “not so much automatism as free association,” a kind of self-directed game that allowed emotion and intuition to unfold freely (de la Torre, 2011). Her figures, simultaneously erotic and melancholic, appear caught in a suspended moment between self-display and self-consciousness. Each panel stages a distinct emotional state—seduction, vulnerability, and withdrawal—forming a psychological sequence that unfolds like scenes within a play.
Yuskavage has likened her recurring figures to an ensemble theatre cast, suggesting that painting for her operates like a stage for recurring roles and emotional enactments (de la Torre, 2011). This dynamic reflects the structure of psychodrama, where roles are performed to externalise inner tension and reveal unconscious desire. The intensity of her monochrome compositions amplifies this sense of performance and containment, turning the canvas into a psychological theatre where emotion is not described but enacted (de la Torre, 2011).
This approach resonates with my own practice, where composition, posture, and gesture serve as ways to externalise emotional states. Like Yuskavage, I aim to stage the fragile balance between exposure and concealment, allowing psychological tension to unfold through visual performance. This connection to psychodrama lies in the act of emotional re-enactment — where painting, like theatre, becomes a site for confronting and transforming internal conflict.
The concept of re-animation describes how something once dormant—an emotion, a gesture, or a memory—can be brought back into visibility through painting. Layers of paint, erasures, and traces work like time marks, where the past and present coexist. I often think of painting as an act of emotional excavation, allowing hidden feelings or memories to resurface. As discussed in Re-Animating Space (2006), re-animation reveals how space and meaning are never fixed but constantly shifting through change. It creates “an experience of space not wholly held captive by narrative,” where the familiar becomes uncertain and open to transformation (Wood, 2006, p.135-144). This idea connects with my own process, where movement, emotion, and material keep changing, giving new life to what once felt lost or unseen.
William Kentridge’s Felix in Exile (1994) (Figure 8) can also be understood through the concept of re-animation. As noted, Kentridge’s animated films, theatrical productions, and graphic works address the personal and social traumas that are the vestiges of South African apartheid (Guggenheim, 2000). The film’s protagonist, Felix, revisits personal and collective memory through a process of drawing, erasure, and re-drawing—acts that literally bring the image, and history itself, back into motion. Through this repetition, Kentridge transforms animation into a form of re-animation: a way of giving new life to the traces of loss and disappearance.
Each erased and redrawn line leaves a visible residue, recording both thought and time. These ghostly marks reflect the tension between past and present, visibility and erasure (Guggenheim, 2000). In this sense, the work reanimates not only images, but also the suppressed emotions and historical wounds that persist beneath them. As Kentridge explained, the woman in Felix in Exile gradually became “the heart of the narrative,” using instruments for mapping and fixing position—a metaphor for locating oneself within the shifting terrain of memory (The Museum of Modern Art, 2025).
Ultimately, the work operates as an act of re-animation, where artistic gesture becomes a way to re-encounter absence and transform loss into presence. This resonates with my own approach to painting, where layers, traces, and revisions serve as means of reanimating emotional experience through material form.
Memory in my practice is not simply recollection but embodiment. As Dylan Trigg (2012) suggests, memory is inseparable from place—it lingers in the textures, surfaces, and atmospheres that shape our experience. Since the exchange between self and world fluctuates, with each emerging and receding in its intensification, Trigg notes that “sometimes it is the case that a place provides the defining character to a memory, such that the memory becomes inextricably bound with place, thus rendering it an event” (Trigg, 2012, p. 90). I approach painting as a way to externalise this embodied memory. The traces of touch, the visible underlayers, and the uneven surfaces become physical manifestations of time passing. Through this process, the canvas functions as both an archive and a living body, holding the residue of emotion and the marks of transformation.
Peter Doig’s Blotter (1993) (Figure 9) embodies the idea of memory as an embodied place. The figure standing on the frozen surface appears both present and distant, absorbed in reflection. The landscape is not a depiction of a specific location, but rather a reconstruction of remembered sensation—the stillness, the shifting light, and the uncertain distance between body and space. As Dylan Trigg (2012) suggests, memory lingers within the textures and atmospheres that shape experience; it becomes inseparable from place. In Blotter, the reflective surface of the ice functions like a psychological mirror, holding traces of both the external world and the inner state of the subject.
Doig himself once noted, “People have confused my paintings with being just about my own memories. Of course we cannot escape these. But I am more interested in the idea of memory” (Gayford, 2015). His words reveal that memory, for him, is not a record of personal events but a psychological state—a process of re-encountering the familiar through distance and reflection. The scene in Blotter feels suspended between memory and perception, suggesting that painting, like memory, is a continual reconstruction of experience. Through this ambiguity, Doig transforms the landscape into a space of emotional resonance—a quiet theatre where memory becomes physical and time becomes visible.
This reflective quality resonates with my own approach to painting, where the act of making becomes a way of revisiting emotional memory through surface and space. In my own paintings, I often work through layers and traces in a similar way, allowing the surface to hold both the residue of gesture and the emotional distance of recollection.
Conclusion
Across this body of work, I have come to understand painting as a psychological and emotional space—one that connects the self with the surrounding world. Through the lens of psychorealism, my practice explores how emotion, memory, and environment intersect within the structures of everyday life. The city, with its layers of tension and intimacy, becomes both subject and metaphor, reflecting the instability of belonging.
While historical psychorealism, as defined by Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff, sought to visualise the unconscious through symbolic abstraction, my approach translates these inner mechanisms into social and spatial terms. Rather than looking inward toward the dream image, I turn outward—to the emotional traces embedded within the urban environment. In this sense, my work repositions psychorealism within a contemporary context, where the psychological and the social, the private and the collective, continually overlap.
My methodology lies in translating psychological tension into material form, using painting as both analytical and affective research. This expanded framework allows painting to function not only as reflection but as re-enactment—a site where emotional and social realities are restaged through gesture, colour, and material. Influenced by artists such as Laura Grace Ford, Jörg Immendorff, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, I see my practice as part of a wider dialogue between inner experience and shared space. By combining psychological mapping with social observation, I aim to create paintings that are both introspective and public—spaces where vulnerability and resilience coexist, and where emotion becomes a form of resistance.
Images
Figure 1, Gabriel’s studio, Camberwell College of Art, Camberwell, London.
Figure 2, MA Fine Art Show, 2025, Camberwell College of Art, Camberwell, London.
Figure 3, Jörg Immendorff, Café Deutschland I, 1978, Acrylic on canvas, 285 × 330 cm (112 × 130 in), Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany.
Figure 4, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, 1982, Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 243.8 × 421.6 cm (96 × 166 in), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
Figure 5, Gabriel Pek Bo Yang, Safe Haven, 2025, Oil, oil pastel, oil stick and spray paint on canvas, 60 x 90 cm, Camberwell, London.
Figure 6, Laura Grace Ford, Savage Messiah, 2011, London.
Figure 7, Lisa Yuskavage, Triptych, 2011, Oil on linen, Each panel 70.25 inches × 77.25 inches, David Zwirner Gallery, New York.
Figure 8, William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994, Colour video, transferred from 35 mm film, with sound, 8 min., 43 secs., Johannesburg, South Africa.
Figure 9, Peter Doig, Blotter, 1993, 249 x 199 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England.
References
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About the Author
Gabriel Pek Bo Yang (1999) is a Malaysian artist currently based in London, where he recently graduated in MA in Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell College of Arts (University of the Arts London). His practice explores the emotional complexity of human relationships, using a range of media including oil paint, oil pastel, soft pastel, charcoal, spray paint, and modelling paste. Drawing on personal experiences and psychological states, his work often blends figuration with expressive mark-making and spatial tension. Gabriel is also interested in experimenting with new materials and expanding his visual language across different media.
Follow him on Instagram @gabriel.pby