Sunday Salon 40

The curatorial and editorial project for systems, non-objective and reductive artists working in the UK

Morrissey & Hancock

Saturation Point Sunday Salon 40

May 2026

Morrissey and Hancock, directors and curators of Saturation Point, present their recent and archival work. Their systems practice covers the last 40 years' output, and this 40th Sunday Salon represents a distillation of the artists' creative voice.

The feeling of an enduring, changing space is critical to Patrick Morrissey’s TQID series. He employs numerical systems in his work, juxtaposing trapezoids, rhombuses and parallelograms in a ‘meandering geometry’. This experimental environment uses a proliferation of systems unfolding in a serial action. The colour in each multiplication of form is exact in terms of tonal closeness.

Works from 'Switch', 'TQID', and 'Rotational' series, pen, acrylic paint on panel, all 12 x12 inches

Untitled study, hand drawing to silk screen (1980), 26 x 20 inches

'TQID' series, acrylic on panel 18 x 18 inches. 2022

From 'TQID' series (2022), acrylic on panel 18 x 18 inches

The perception of optical flaring of colour comes, perhaps, out of an ability he has employed across media, particularly analogue and digital film. The paintings seem to respond to the possibilities in projected imagery, light, monumentality and sequential / serial development. But we also read them as memory images, depending on the recollection of different segments or sound waves.

For Morrissey the idea of playback, or obliteration of content from continuous playing, opens up the notion of an after-image, either from the modality of the past or from the experience of pure colour saturation in varying systems. His experimental approach references indexical traces and philosophical debates about systems, and describes forms that can be found within the built or natural environment.

'TQID' and 'Rotational' drawing

Hanz Hancock uses varying degrees of shadow and numerical sequences to create a rudimentary code, which is ultimately variable in his drawing / painting / constructions. While a computer can make extremely complex patterns or algorithmic sequences, it is unable to make emotional decisions concerning quality.

For Hancock, numerical systems are pared down to the grid; i.e. the formation of pattern. This pattern is often sampled and accrued into groups. The approach develops a generative mechanism, or device, to orchestrate the drawing. The expansion of the system perhaps comes out of Hancock’s sense of place and his understanding of London and its histories. The significance of its architecture and in-between spaces creates a fluttering sense of movement in the works.

“My main concern is to reference the geometry and rhythms of the urban environment.” (Hanz Hancock)

(Left) Internal Contact' acrylic on canvas , 2013 4 x 4ft, (Right) 'Important Corner' acrylic on canvas , 4ft x 4ft, both commissioned by William Angus Hughes Gallery London for 'Determinant'.

In his untitled works, the numerical order mimics a mathematical, geometric / architectural code. But drilling down into the aesthetics of the work, there seems to be an innate poetic quality in the way it is handled. For Hancock, repetition can go two ways: either tightening up and upsetting its tenuous hold, or humanising what might otherwise appear inaccessible.

“Structures that form in the close mesh of drawn lines coalesce and dissipate, and are metaphors for the transient nature of geometric form found in the natural and built environment.”

(Left) 'TQID' series 18 x 18 inches, acrylic on panel. (Right) 'Notional Wall', acrylic on canvas, 4 x 4ft, (2013), commissioned by William Angus Hughes gallery, London for 'Determinant'.

‘TQID’ series (2022), acrylic on panel