Andy Piedilato, ZigZag Brick Wall, 2008, oil, enamel, acrylic on canvas. Via the artist.

Andy Piedilato paints in the dark. He admitted that under dim light, he finds it easier to paint over certain passages of the smoke that he might otherwise want to keep. The overriding principle is striking a balance between lighter and darker values, between highlights and shadows. This skeleton of chiaroscuro arranges the muscles of his colors so they flex more fiercely. Piedilato approaches color like a chiropractor. Although he may aggressively thump and prod different sections with various layers of messy hues, he never looses sight of the underlying structure of light and dark.

The intensely thick facture in each painting is beyond the grasp of low resolution web reproductions. This rich texture grabs the viewer in every picture with its mountains, valleys and flowing rivers. Piedilato is one more link in the wider trend of art that screams out with its facture. In an era when online imagery substitutes for experiences in the flesh, his painting fights back with tactile confrontations that the Internet can't rival.

The artist remarked to your commentator that "I paint with a huge sense of hopefulness. I don't have an idea but I like the idea of finding one – an awesome idea you have for a picture will not be as awesome as the one you find." It's an ethos of seizing upon the serendipity of the process rather than falling back into tired routines or painting from mental boiler plates.

The tough aspect of this carpe diem approach is that the artist sees his works as series of forks in the road, in which the painting was leading in a few different directions and he wonders whether picked the right path and contemplates its cascading repercussions. But this is a sign of depth. Each painting becomes a deep, long and rewarding conversation with itself. Highly reactive to its own image – each work is charged with the potential of an unstable element as well as the tenacity of self-individuation.