Our lives are visual lives, increasingly, alarmingly and beautifully so. Visual complexity exists in all our systems, our metaphors, our structures and in the created subtext. It is present in how we practice leisure and in all our forms of escapism; it is one of the controlling components of consumerism and it is part of our institutional realities.

Visual complexity is in a sense a symbol of our times. Using mixed media, and the technique of layering, juxtaposition and an obsessive frenetic line, Karl Mustoe has created a rich detailed visual language – a personal language – that comments both positively and negatively on this symbol of our times by embracing its contradictions, its sophistication and its self involvement.