Anecdote of the Jar, an Imagist poem written in sonnet form, was published in Wallace Stevens’ first collection, Harmonium, in 1919. In its hallucinatory wrangling, the poem describes a strange act and a strange realisation. A jar – a kind of hopeful, empty eye as well as a metaphor for the ego – when placed on a hill becomes a hub of meaning for the natural world while maintaining its own barrenness. In this private, barely communicable act – anecdote, derived from the Greek, refers to private, unpublished items – there is a rueful perplexity at the separation of the two registers of the human and the natural.

In this show, the jar is the artifice of ‘painting’ as a port – the support, the surface and pictorial space – at odds with the consciousness to arrest or tame the making, in the sense that the desire to make and realise the nature of a painting is a subconscious or a wild desire of the ego.

All three painters’ ‘unpublished items’, their private concerns, differ, but are aligned by the quality of intention to encapsulate the metaphysical quiddity of a given painting through subject, method and space, bypassing any demand for interpretation, considering where that intention might come from, what role it plays in the human mind, and what purpose the insistent desire for meaning serves.