KARL ALLEN: Ghost in the Canvas

Photo: Christopher Sims

​SøEdited Team:
SøEditor-In-Chief/Interview : Chris Saint Sims​
​SøDigital Director: Savannah Barthorpe​​​​​​​​​

​Karl Allen resists the word “career.” It suggests a path dictated by outside validation, by endorsements, by recognition from others. Instead, his life is a creative existence, restless, layered, and shaped by different mediums across the fringes of artistic society. Over the years, his practice has stretched through film, performance, and visual installation. But it is painting at this point of focus, a practice he approaches with instinctive surrender rather than strategic control.

​Allen’s first solo exhibition at Jealous Gallery in London marks a shift, not only in visibility but in the intensity of his work. What appears to be a rapidly produced series of paintings is, in fact, the culmination of more than fifteen years of artistic refinement, years spent exploring palettes, textures, and the thresholds between figuration and abstraction. What emerges in his work is less a product of planning than of listening. Is this an inner ghost that guides him? An instinctive process in which he becomes less the creator and more the recorder of what pushes through him.

​Film and painting could not be further apart for Allen in terms of process. In his film practice, the act is one of orchestration: holding together crews, schedules, and compositional elements. Collaboration requires structure. Someone must hold the reins, and that person is him. But painting demands the opposite.

​
​“In film, you manage chaos,” Allen reflects. “But with painting, the chaos manages you.” His process begins with setting the palette, perhaps shifting the canvas around to find a new angle. Then comes the letting go. What follows is a negotiation between the instinctive and the accidental. He courts instability, refusing to let any single image settle too neatly. If a figure emerges, he distorts it; if a motif becomes too legible, he covers or flips it. The act is one of sabotage as much as construction.

​This refusal to resolve images into clarity gives the paintings their peculiar charge. They oscillate between recognition and obscurity, haunted by the suggestion of forms that never quite arrive. The brain strains to make sense, to identify faces, landscapes, symbols, but the work resists. That resistance, Allan insists, is where the work comes alive.

The exhibition at Jealous Gallery came together with startling speed, but Allan rejects the idea of sudden inspiration. “It looks fast,” he admits, “but it was fifteen years in the making.”
​
Those years were spent experimenting across media, building fluency in colour, texture, and composition. What made this body of work possible was the accumulated instinct born from failure, repetition, and risk. When the moment came, he could work quickly because his vocabulary was already internalised. Each brushstroke was backed by years of trial and error.

​He resists the myth of the frustrated artist struggling to produce. For him, creation is less a battle and more a craving. 

“I wake up needing to paint,” he says. The urgency is physical. The work is less about solving problems than about answering a call. Once the call is answered, the release comes, the canvas becomes a snapshot of his state at that moment, a record of how his visual language is shifting.

If film once brought chaos, painting now brings release. The tension between the two forms is not oppositional but complementary. With age and experience, Allen has grown more comfortable with the pressures of film: the endless trial and error, the reliance on others, the deadlines. Where once it was suffocating, he now finds a strange rhythm within it.

​That shift has only deepened the meditative qualities of painting. Alone with the canvas, there is no one to answer to, no schedule to hold. If a work falters, it simply becomes part of the journey. This acceptance, the willingness to let mistakes fold into the process, mirrors the way he has come to see his own life. Contradictions are not failures; they are truths.

The theme of contradiction sits at the heart of this new body of work. Layered surfaces reveal different stories pressing against one another: one image suffocated while another pushes through, motifs buried only to reappear in ghostly fragments. These tensions mirror the contradictions Allen observes in the world around him, and in himself.

He recalls noticing artists who wear slogans of rebellion, hats demanding “Suffocate the Bourgeois” while clearly belonging to the bourgeois themselves. At first, it struck him as hypocrisy. Then he recognised the same condition in his own life. “We all carry a bit of the bourgeois in us,” he reflects, particularly in a place like Croydon where he was brought up, or elsewhere in Britain, where the working-class generation of thirty or forty years ago has become property owners and accumulated wealth. People who once had nothing now position themselves as though they still live with nothing. That contradiction fascinated him, and it found its way into his paintings.

The canvases, then, become acts of honesty rather than resolution. They acknowledge that identity is layered, unstable, often contradictory. The works do not solve this tension; they present it, breathe within it, allow it to exist without apology.

If there is one discovery Allen names as the core of this exhibition, it is trust. Trust in his instincts, in his palette, in his shifting motifs. Trust that the work need not justify itself with a singular narrative. Trust that contradictions are not weaknesses but the essence of honesty.
​
This newfound confidence is visible in his recent approach. Where once he may have second-guessed each compositional choice, now he embraces them. If a painting fails, it is not a personal failure. It simply wasn’t meant to exist. That lightness—that refusal to be crushed by expectation—has given him freedom.

​“I don’t apologise for the contradictions anymore,” Allen says. “They make the work real.”

An inner ghost captures much of what his practice has become. It is not mysticism so much as a recognition of forces beyond conscious control. The ghost is instinct, memory, contradiction, subconscious imagery pushing through layers of paint. The artist becomes a conduit, a witness to something larger than himself.

In this sense, Allen’s painting is closer to excavation than construction. Each work uncovers fragments of something hidden: half-formed figures, disrupted landscapes, unstable narratives. What emerges is not fixed but fleeting, always on the edge of recognition, as though the canvas itself is haunted.

​Though the Jealous Gallery show may seem like a beginning, Allen views it as one more moment in a long continuum. He is not interested in milestones or career markers. The work is ongoing, a flow of cravings answered, contradictions lived with, ghosts recorded.

Painting remains the medium that allows him to explore these forces most directly, but he continues to move between projects, each feeding into each other. What unites them all is not genre or discipline but the same commitment to ambiguity, contradiction, and instinct.

As he looks forward, Allen speaks less about goals and more about process. What matters is staying present to the cravings, allowing the ghosts to surface, and refusing to lock identity into neat categories. His art is not about resolution but survival within complexity.

Karl Allen Solo Show
9th - 18th October 2025
Jealous Gallery
53 Curtain Road
London EC2A 3PT