Marcus Olea

The studio is on the fourth floor of a building that used to make buttons. Marcus Olea gets there around ten and leaves when the light comes up — not because the dark is romantic, he says, but because it's the only time the noise in his head matches the noise outside. "During the day I'm reacting to things. At night there's nothing to react to. There's just the painting telling me what it needs."

What it needs, most nights, is to be scraped back. He builds a surface up over hours — layers of ochre, bone, a green he mixes himself and won't name — and then takes most of it off again with a flat blade, leaving only the parts that survived. The finished paintings look like memories: you can tell something was there, even where it's gone.

He didn't go to art school. He framed other people's work for a decade — stretching canvas, cutting mats, learning every medium by handling the finished result — before he let himself make anything of his own. "I knew what good felt like in my hands a long time before I could make it," he says. "That's a strange way to start. You can recognise the thing you can't do yet."

I'm not painting what I see. I'm painting what's left after I stop looking.

That gap — between recognising and making — is the whole film, really. We followed him across four nights. There is almost no talking in the studio; the camera mostly watches his hands. He paints standing, close to the canvas, then walks to the far wall and looks for a long time, and walks back. The looking takes longer than the painting.

Ask him why night, why solitude, why twelve years of the same small hours, and he shrugs in a way that the film keeps in. "Everyone's making something," he says. "A meal, a sentence, a kid. I just happen to do mine with paint, at the worst possible time, for almost no one. That's not special. That's just what it costs me."

Then he turns back to the wall, and the conversation is over, and the painting tells him what it needs.