A photographer among painters can seem like an intruder who has slipped through a border with a forged pass. There on the other side the language is not quite the same, the knowledge not always familiar and the ways of working fundamentally different. And unlike the painter, the photographer has an umbilically dependent relationship with the visible world. Some would even say that his pictures have already been made for him and all he has to do is hunt them out. Whereas the painter always starts with nothing and is obliged to initiate an indeterminate chain of aesthetic choices that may or may not lead to a finished work.

Michael Carter observes, “But irrespective of these distinctions Alan Bourne, Lar Cann and I seem to be after the same thing, although that thing contains many things and is hard to define. Sometimes it seems like some kind of distillation of optical experience associated with the desire to transform the hard world of objects into new kinds of phenomena. Certainly in our work the formal and abstract properties always seem to preside and be the most assertive feature at a glance. But what is always clear - the place where we really converge - is in the domain of colour. And this is not just a place of orgy where the marvelousness of colour is indulged just for an extravagant display carrying no particular visual meaning. Rather, it is the organisation of discrete colour employed as modes of separation, relation and structure for a unified pictorial purpose. This, of course, is a rather analytical approach, but that is another thing we seem to share. There is, perhaps, a discipline - maybe even a rigour - in the way we scrutinise and conduct the process of making images. And maybe that is driven by a desire to achieve a sense of detached control over the spontaneous emergence of intrusive emotional material which would otherwise risk disturbance in form and balance.”

He continues, “The term simultaneous contrast in the title is a basic concept in colour theory and defines how colours alter in appearance when laid alongside other colours. We thought we would extend this concept beyond the colours which exist together in individual frames. We would hang our pictures in a presentation that provokes attentive comparison not just within one person’s range of works but across all three. We would be converging both our similarities and differences and perhaps show an overall integration, a kind of tripartite mosaic in which individuality prospered in a collective setting. And there, among the differences between us, would be the one abiding aim of bringing about a new constructed beauty.”

But the promised colour is not obtrusive. There is more the sense of subdued colours ebbing into one another in a controlled unemphatic way, the shapes and abstract forms rising into prominence without heavy gestures. The sense of depiction of the outside world of objects is minimal, and sometimes only the titles tell how the pictures are derived. But the pictures aren’t primarily there to represent things. They are there to show how things can be transformed into something else which doesn’t already exist. This attempts to create the right sense of engagement, the right balance between the world we know and the world we make. In occupying both at the same time the experience becomes fuller, more complex.