The stripes, blocks and lines of this painting overlap like the folded flaps of a cardboard box, wedged underneath each other in what is almost a puzzle that finally presents a flat surface. Stepping closer, it becomes possible to guess how Hilton laid them down: the orange-brown horizontal stripe is covered by the vertical, glossy black block of oil, but dirtied by an earlier brush full of black paint, and the central brown shape nearly, but not quite hides a similarly-sized area of purple. To its right, dry-brushed scratches of light blue seem to predate everything but the dirty cream of the primed background. This doesn't get us very far, however, as Hilton is being studiously chaotic. A natural left-hander, an infection later forced him to use his right to paint his last, small-scale gouaches, and Andrew Lambirth, for one, would “love to know” if he elected to use the same hand on the swooping, scribbling black lines we see here, in an “attempt to access the state of mind below the deliberate, to tap in to the spontaneous and untutored”.