The Hollow Triptych

“Each canvas is an impossible dreamscape. Kaleidoscope coils of thick impasto sketch forms familiar and strange. Are those dark shapes above the vast dome of Saint Fiacre’s stalactites, or teeth? Is that carmine smudge rising from the jungle canopy an errant brushstroke, or one of the Bazaar’s lofty spires?”

An art gallery has appeared on Hollow Street – one of London’s most insalubrious locales – and its collection is taking the city by storm. The rich and mannered brave the muck to catch a glimpse of coiling, idiosyncratic masterworks. But just who is the Recondite Painter? How did he come by his hallucinatory talents? And why, when you sleep, do you dream of paint, and of skin that is not your own?