All Systems Tend Toward Disorder: The Garden Paintings
A serious, but soft, encounter. Oil on linen, 56x56cm. 2025.
Michael Greaves. All Systems Tend Toward Disorder
In All Systems Tend Toward Disorder, Michael Greaves turns the garden into a metaphor for perception, a stage where human order meets the inevitability of decay. These paintings are not of nature, but of our urge to frame it, to beautify and control what resists control.
The garden here becomes a mask: a surface of cultivated calm concealing the pulse of disorder beneath. Each brushstroke rehearses this tension, the desire to compose, the acceptance of collapse. Form gathers, disperses, gathers again.
Drawing on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, Greaves paints perception as something lived and temporal, a conversation between body and world, between seeing and being seen. The works hover between structure and dissolution, memory and immediacy, order and entropy.
What emerges is not landscape, but consciousness itself: a record of our attempts to hold still the passing flow of time. In these shifting, luminous fields, Greaves reveals that beauty is never fixed, it is what flickers, momentarily, before disorder resumes.
James Leigh Van Roche. 2025.
How perception fails, mutates, or misfires. Oil on linen. 56x56cm. 2025.The Impossibility of Seeing Everything at Once. Oil on linen. 106x106cm. 2025.Towards a New Romantic Den and Cave. Oil on linen. 56x61cm. 2025.My Idle Mind. Oil on linen. 56x61cm. 2025.Light is a Velvet Softness. Oil on canvas. 66x66cm. 2025The temporal thickness of perception. Oil on canvas. 127x174cm. 2025.Separation anxiety. Oil on canvas. 56x61cm. 2025.forcing an encounter with the gaps between perception. Oil on canvas. 61x56cm. 2025.A portrait. Oil on canvas. 56x61cm. 2025.Perception is never objective. Oil on canvas. 56x61cm. 2025.Interior fold #1 Oil on canvas. 83x66cm. 2025.First fold. (Tomahawk) Oil on canvas. 56x60cm. 2025When it seemed time to leave. Oil on canvas. 56x60cm. 2025.The watcher. Oil on canvas. 56x60cm. 2025.All systems tend toward disorder. Oil on canvas. 150x130cm. 2025. (Artists collection)Sonorous Oil on canvas. 91x106cm. 2025Fragment veils. Oil on canvas. 40.5×45.5cm. 2025.A Young Family. Oil on canvas. 36.5×45.5cm. 2025.The Deceiving appearances of the world. Oil on canvas. 45.5×45.5cm. 2025.On Garden Place. Oil on canvas. 35×43.5cm. 2025. (Private collection)Greengold. Oil on canvas. 42.5x47cm. 2025. (Available)Several senses collected. Oil on canvas. 41.5x47cm. 2025. (Available)A cautious interaction. Oil on canvas. 106X106cm. 2025. (Available)Filter. 76x84cm. Oil on canvas. 2025. (Available)Simply a tree in the wind. Oil on linen. 61x61cm. 2025. (Available)The Thinker. Oil on canvas. 65.5x76cm. 2025. (Available)I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory. Oil on canvas. 83.5x115cm. 2025. (Available)The world isn’t just seen — it shows itself. Oil on canvas. 37.5×50.5cm. 2025. (Private collection)If I told you the story, you would not even blush. Oil on canvas. 91x106cm. 2025Resisting Focus. Oil on canvas. 40.5×46.5cm. 2024 (Private Collection)Slow Motion Adaptation. Oil on canvas. 80.5cmx110.5cm. 2024. (Private Collection Mt Manganui)The Practice. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 80.5cmx110.5cm. 2024. (Private Collection Dunedin)Idle Memory. Oil on canvas. 80.5cmx110.5cm. 2024. (Private Collection)A Stand In. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 70.5cmx110.5cm. 2024. (Available)The Metaphysicas of a phenomenological attraction. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 80.5cmx110.5cm. 2024. (Available)OVERLAP #1. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 38cmx51cm. 2024. (Private Collection)
MICHAEL GREAVES 