Liam Everett’s recent body of work, presented in the exhibition He Loved Him Madly, continues his exploration of painting as an accumulative, almost fugitive practice — one where process, erasure, and material transience coalesce into resonant, unstable surfaces. The exhibition centers on a series of large-scale tondos (circular canvases, each approximately 195 cm in diameter), alongside other more intimately scaled works, all of which bear the traces of Everett’s laborious, ritualistic methods. His paintings emerge through cycles of application and removal, ayers of pigment, salt, alcohol, and solvents are worked, distressed, and partially effaced, leaving behind luminous, palimpsestic fields that hover between presence and dissolution.

The exhibition’s title, He Loved Him Madly, borrowed from Miles Davis’s haunting 1974 elegy for Duke Ellington, suggests an undercurrent of devotion, loss, and improvisational intensity — themes that resonate with Everett’s approach.
Like Davis’s composition, which unfolds through slow, shifting repetitions, Everett’s paintings operate in a space of gradual revelation, where meaning is deferred and the act of looking becomes a durational experience. The tondos, in particular, with their allover, non-hierarchical compositions, evoke celestial orbs or weathered artefacts, their surfaces at once geological and ephemeral.