Tomas Harker, studio.

Courtesy of the artist.

Paint in your work conceals and reveals at the same time: layered, reworked, never quite settled. Is that a deliberate strategy or something you noticed the medium doing and decided to trust?

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A particular subject I often look for is duplicitous surfaces. These surfaces act as intermediaries and already perform in a way parallel to paint on canvas. Working with them is a way to engage the medium’s nature.

Persona, oil on canvas, 2024, 30x150cm

Credit: Nicodim

Sherwood Forest is the title of your 2025 show, but it's also where you're from — Worksop sits at the edge of the actual forest. Robin Hood is a myth about an outlaw who operates in the margins, who redistributes power from inside a system he refuses to belong to. That feels close to what your paintings do. How personal was that title, and how consciously were you drawing on the place you came from?

The title came about after I recently moved from London back to close to where I’m from, which made me re-evaluate things I’d taken for granted in my youth. The myth of Robin Hood is carnivalesque: it upends usual hierarchies—“steal from the rich, give to the poor”—inverting the usual direction of increasingly concentrated wealth. That timeless appeal is what makes a myth. At a moment when the net of surveillance is closing in and social media operates like a panopticon, the figure of an outlaw hidden in the forest takes on a new kind of resonance.

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Identity in your work is described as a performance, a mask, something unstable. Is that a condition you find troubling, or one you've made peace with?

I started thinking about this while reading The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. The book uses the image of the ship Argo—after years of replacing its parts, it’s still called the Argo—which I believe originally comes from Roland Barthes.

 

That’s true of our “self,” and I see it as a positive thing. It’s troubling to treat identities as stable, branded corporations for transaction. The aestheticization of the self was a neoliberal project that began in the 20th century and can feel like a prison. For me the mask is the persona—a medium for hidden, unstable desires. This returns us to the carnivalesque, where the role you’re usually forced to perform can be temporarily escaped through the anonymity of a mask. It’s a condition I remain conflicted about.

Your practice sits between painting, photography, and film, always using one medium to think about another. What does painting give you that looking at a film still directly wouldn't?

This reminds me of how Impressionism developed partly as a response to the camera. If a camera can make a picture in a moment, why compete with it? Painters became more concerned with the impression of the world. That conclusion still feels relevant today, but now the challenge is not only the ubiquitous image but also vast flows of data. Cinema and mass media were once called The Spectacle; today’s landscape feels more like a shared hallucination. Pieces of pop-cultural detritus float in the ether, and unknowable forces work behind the scenes. As a historical medium, painting is oddly well placed to describe this present.

 

When I see another painter’s work, I’m drawn to their gestures, their hand, and the ways they choose to describe things. You feel a kind of empathy with their thought process and an elevation of whatever they focus on. There’s also a temporal difference between cinema and the static nature of painting. Painting is a slow medium that doesn’t happen at once; the depth of meaning must be concentrated within a single static object. That’s what can make it genuinely strange.

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What are you working on now?

At the moment I’m working towards a solo show at Nicodim Gallery in New York in September. Broadly, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between wealth and violence, the ambivalence of consumption, dream logic, and the seductiveness of nostalgia. I’ve been referencing some very good (and some awful) 1960s films, Picasso, classical mythology, and early art photography.