Michael Hazell, a self-taught painter from Sydney, is known for figurative abstractions that test painting’s dual life as image and surface. His work presses through the page and into the layouts of the Distinct Inside booklets co-created with Paweł Jankiewicz. Together, they sustain an ongoing collaboration across text–image diptychs, conceptual exhibitions, and para-curatorial strategies, embracing ambiguity, contradiction, and intensity.

“I like the antipathy between the concrete and the ambiguous,” Hazell notes. “I push this paradox to the point at which it’s all but broken down. The obscure becomes obvious and the legible becomes incoherent — the great work then would be one of absolute mystery and absolute revelation.”

Among their joint works, One Could Say frames a textual–image diptych on the genesis of perception, where cosmological afterglow and radiating matter meet in painting’s resistance to legibility. It Would Have Been Falling-Prey reads Hazell’s painted surfaces as a para-poetic manifesto on defacement, spectral figuration, and refusal. Hazell’s solo exhibition Auf Wiedersehen (P145, Berlin, 2022) — with works such as Throw the Towel and Push the Daisies — staged euphemisms for death and resistance in a painterly language of humor, muted violence, and emotional distortion.

Their dialogues wrestle with the notion of the in-distinct — a zone built from localised intensities and ambient authorship. For Hazell, this is “building a grid”: a resonant surface formed from dispersed points, where language and image meet in resistance to spectacularisation and in commitment to surface tension.

[phot. by Moritz Haase]