McAfee’s works often announce themselves with humour. Bright colour, cartoon exaggeration, and figures caught mid-gesture draw the viewer in. Yet beneath this apparent lightness is a sustained enquiry into time, memory, and what it means to persist as a painter today. Painting is approached as a form of play, not as frivolity, but as a rule-based activity in which images are tested, misremembered, reassembled, and held in productive tension.
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Art history and personal experience circulate throughout the exhibition, though rarely in direct or faithful ways. Drawing equally from canonical painting, popular culture, and the everyday realities of studio life. References surface, slip away, and reappear elsewhere, changed by time and use. Rather than anchoring the work, these sources remain unstable, filtered through memory and repetition.
Central to this practice is the idea of painting as a conversation across time. Earlier versions of the work remain present, embedded within the surface. The studio becomes both a physical and psychological space, where repetition, hesitation, and return are visible. In recent works, the figure of the painter enters the frame more explicitly, bringing questions of labour, ageing, masculinity, and vulnerability into focus without dramatisation or myth.
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McAfee’s long engagement with sound and recorded voice underpins this painterly enquiry. Just as recorded voices can return to confront their speaker years later, these images carry traces of their own pasts. They speak back, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes insistently, resisting fixed meaning.
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A late evening in the future. invites the viewer not to decode, but to overhear. The works do not resolve their questions so much as hold them open, offering a layered and quietly human reflection on making, remembering, and continuing. The exhibition invites viewers to move intuitively, allowing connections to form gradually and differently for each encounter.