“Somewhere between realism and surrealism sits a distinctively uncomfortable yet curiously seductive pictorial mode I call perverted realism…Painting of this sort is almost by definition dark in temperament. But much of it is chromatically dark, too, conjuring spaces full of shadow and murk…In this atmosphere of malaise—and amid a general efflorescence of figurative painting—a perverted realism has become an appealing stylistic choice, but it seems to come to few practitioners as naturally as it does to Issy Wood.”