The British artist Sam Jackson has been trailblazing a modern approach to portraiture ever since his graduation from the Royal Academy back in 2007, and is currently on something of a transatlantic tour, following his recent mid-career retrospective. Over the course of a fifteen-year career Jackson has exhibited all over the world, and won considerable global acclaim, forwarding an aesthetic that effortlessly straddles classical painting, tagging, graffiti and the visual cultures of graphic and tattoo art. He then blends these various aesthetic disciplines with fragmented text that inveigles one into a dream-like reverie of being - the amalgamation of personal and societal motifs resulting in a symbolic fugue that taps into Jungian notions of collective consciousness. His appropriation of classical portraiture is particularly interesting in this regard, making us reconsider traditional notions of beauty amidst scattered scrawled words and blotches of spray-can paint – often fusing emotive biographical and autobiographical information in a heavily layered and defiant abstraction of clear meaning.