If books could bleed, they’d likely look something like an Andrew Salgado painting. His latest exhibition, Self-Portrait as a Stack of Books, staged at BEERS London, isn’t just an ode to literature—it’s a fever dream written in oil and pastel. Each canvas arrives like a page torn from some psychotropic novel, swirling with color, ambiguity, and a reader’s wild imagination.

Graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2009, and is regarded as one of the United Kingdom’s leading figurative painters. He has exhibited worldwide, with solo exhibitions including London, New York, Tokyo, Miami, Toronto, Cape Town, Sydney, and throughout Europe.

For Salgado—who toggles between studios in London and New Brunswick—literature isn’t a backdrop; it’s a living, breathing muse. My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, a direct nod to Ottessa Moshfegh’s cult-favorite novel, translates the story’s malaise into languid brushstrokes and heavy-lidded gazes. Elsewhere, Véra (Please Come Over, You’re Always Welcome) resurrects Véra Nabokov, imagined mid-epistolary trance, perhaps composing one of her famously incinerated letters. Here, Véra becomes not merely a figure in history but a myth reconstructed in color and memory.

Ekphrasis in Reverse: Painting as Literary Response

Salgado delights in citation—not as academic footnote, but as raw material. The paintings are multilayered not just in technique but in reference, echo, and voice. Virginia Woolf’s psychological intricacy, Borges’ labyrinthine metaphysics, Atwood’s chilly futurism—all orbit his practice.

Why shouldn’t the inverse of ekphrasis be true?

– And he makes a compelling case, he asks.

If literature can describe visual art, why can’t visual art answer back?

Each canvas is built intuitively, like a diary entry rewritten until it slips out of time. Irregular stripes twitch across the image, circles drift into semi-symbols, and faces become almost masks—recognizable yet abstracted, like dreams half-remembered. There’s always something withheld. Something veiled just behind the palette.

The Reader as Viewer, the Viewer as Co-Author

If you’re expecting a linear story, turn back. Salgado isn’t here to hand you a narrative; he’s offering a mirror. One filled with fingerprints, smudges, and underpainted ghosts. The viewer must do the reading, must parse the signals—sometimes literal (book titles), sometimes gestural (a scribble, a stare, a sudden shift in scale).

There are no wrong answers, whatever you take from it—from the books, or the paintings, or the ideas within—it’s all correct.

– Salgado says.

That generosity is rare in contemporary art, which often demands decoding rather than emotional resonance. Salgado, however, invites the viewer to feel first, interpret later.

And while his works hum with painterly confidence, they are equally about vulnerability—the artist’s own, but also ours, as viewers fumbling through a library of color and symbol, each page fraying into the next.

In Self-Portrait as a Stack of Books, the self is unfixed, layered, fragmented—much like memory itself. Salgado paints not to immortalize, but to investigate. The portraits don’t resolve, they reveal. And like a good novel, they end by expanding.

One might say Salgado doesn’t just paint people. He paints what happens to them after they’ve been read.