A short while ago Richard Penn calls me to ask if I would give an introduction to this show. The is a very long silence befor I answer

I say - Richard, I know nothing about art. At least no more than the next guy, and probably less.

He says - yes, that is the point.

I say - you need somebody steeped in the history and legacy and import and culture and language of visual art.

He says - I think not.

I say - I will not be able to say a single interesting thing about your work, I can barely distinguish a pointillist form cubist

He says - looked at with certain eyes, they are one and the same

I say - why are you being horrible to me

He says - trust me, I will respect you in the morning

However…

I am a novelist. And as such, I have an abiding interest in Art with a capital A - the creation of something from nothing, at least something of value. And I am interested in the fingerprint that the artist leaves behind when he creates something - the faint echo of the author that resonates behind the work.

Richard and I share an proud and embarrassing intimacy - a zealous awe of science and what it has told us about the universe, and moreover, the stories that are still to tell, the continuous and endless un-peeling of our ignorance and doubt, and the replacing of that doubt with insight. We talk about it often, exchange Facebook posts and emails brimming with outrage at pseudoscience and superstition and religion and filled with news of the robust dignities of scientific endeavour.

And it is from this place that the work you will see tonight stems. From knowledge and it shadows - ignorance and anxiety and error and glitch and the problem of accurate representation. Richard tells me that the tension between these two worlds is only stilled as he works on these pieces, whose life is fueled by the collision of what we know and what we don't, or can’t. And the all too human tools with which we try to represent it all.

I asked Richard what these works meant - a dangerous question for an artist who would rather leave that to the interpretation of the viewer. But as a literalist and outsider, I pressed.

He says, or implies, or hints - what you see, in every painting is the encoding of a piece of the universe, with all the flaws and glitches that are amplified when the analog majesty of nature is constrained by the technologies of representation and and rule-based frameworks. You will see lines and dots and whorls and elegant skeins, reminiscent of bits and bytes and drafting and electromagnetic spectra, warped and distorted, sometimes hazy, sometimes hinting at color, sometime chaotic - as they try to represent something larger than themselves - an alien planet, a land mass, cellular life, a part of a spacecraft, a hallucinogenic topography.

You will all have heard of sampling, specifically in relation to music, where sounds are carved into tiny pieces, and translated to bits to be played back on a digital device. In the old days (the 80s) the sampling rates were too low, it seriously degraded the music. Then computers got faster, and sampling rates got higher, and soon they were high enough so that the real sound and the digital sound were to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable. They did the same for video. Same principle in an electron microscope and a radio telescope. The same is true (in another form) of our eyes and ears. But here is the thing - sampling will always be a desperate and failed approximation of the real world. And in this show Richard puts the concept of sample under the disobedient scrutiny of the artist’s eye.

As you stare at these pieces, rendered with exquisite and minute callibration, try to imagine the larger worlds that are trying to be encoded through these thousands of tiny building blocks . You will see the sudden jarring geometric interruptions of white emptiness - a line, a square, negative space - Richard is telling us no matter how hard we try at representing the universe - there will always be gaping and lonely holes in our knowledge, even as science continues to swashbuckle on point. To defend the from discomfort of this, Richard recognises them and situates them in our larger view of this strange cosmos in which we live.

A short story was written about this work by Ricahrd’s friend, writer Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown, - you will find it on the wall. It is called ‘The Word For It’. A gentle deceit, of course.

Because sometimes there no words.

But there is always art.