We have been taught to believe that out of chaos, formless slime, confusion and darkness there came, thanks to an act of divine authority, light, coordination, rhythm, crystallisation and eventually life itself, but Paul Caffell asks us to re-examine our origins.  Even in its ugliest or most violent manifestations – a corpse in a state of putrifaction or an active volcano – we cannot exclude the feeling of awe and fascination at the way in which nature goes about her transformations.  We are bound to appreciate the continual metamorphosis that is going on and of which we are part.
Paul Caffell has chosen to assist in this drama by giving paint the animated resemblance of the stirrings of primeval life.  The forms he develops are what we might call pre-creational; they are the simple rudimentary forms that existed even before the garden of Eden, the raw material of creation from which are bred structures of increasing complexity.  Beginning with the worm, the fish, crustacea we reach eventually man’s imitations of nature and that bastard offspring of the human spirit and adversity, the machine.  Caffell’s paintings show unexpected resemblances between these remote extremes.  He has amalgamated organisms that swim, writhe together or fly into a world which is at the same time the sea-bed and the sky undivided by the barrier of the horizon.
The skill with which he presents us with lashing phosphorescent shapes closely entwined in fertile intercourse and the runnels they open up to a background of light give us a new vision of Laocoon absorbed with his sons into a seething mass from which life will again emerge.

 © Roland Penrose