Although much of Sussex artist Martin Broadley’s work is seared with the contemporary hard edge of ‘now’ and perhaps refers to the vocabulary of, say, the in-your-face, achingly simple and deceptively frank Christopher Wool, his work is more deeply underscored and informed by the photographs of Aaron Siskind – particularly the ‘Homage to Franz Kline’ pictures.

Like Siskind, whose work focuses on the details of nature and architecture, he presents them as flat surfaces to create a new image out of them, which stands independent of the original subject. The subject matter can be found everywhere, yet he travels widely to find it: Antwerp, Barcelona, Brighton, Cologne, Crete, Florence, London, Porto, Seville, Thassos all provide a rich source for Martin’s abstract photography. Torn edges, street art, graffiti and tags are all a magnet for Martin’s camera but the sweeps and gestures have a profound aesthetic that move away from the violent acquisition of surface that much urban art employs.

For many, graffiti is mindless vandalism, a kind of cultural fascism: ‘I daub, therefore I own’, but in a sense one could argue that it is not a million miles from Marcel Duchamp’s ‘R. Mutt’ in that acquisition of an object or surface is key to both types of art.

Brassai discovered the weird beauty of graffiti – he recognised what was indelible about graffiti, the bad penmanship of the group unconscious. In his photographs of the scribbled Paris walls, you find sex, anger, exaltation.

In the eighties, at the height of the ‘new heroic’ in art, artists like Julian Schnabel suggested that graffiti had the texture of poverty and displayed an underlying edge of brutality, while remaining suffused with compositional energy. An antique dealer might call this layering ‘patina’, but whatever you call it and whatever one feels about it, there’s no denying that the layers of language are history in the making: a rich tapestry, a palimpsest of screams for recognition – angry, fluid and graceful. A palimpsest being a surface that has been scraped off and used again, revealimg the ghosts of architecture – an image of what once was. In the built environment, this occurs more than we might think. Whenever spaces are shuffled, rebuilt, or remodeled, shadows remain. Tarred rooflines remain on the sides of a building long after the neighbouring structure has been demolished; removed stairs leave a mark where the painted wall surface stopped. Dust lines remain from a relocated appliance. Ancient ruins speak volumes of their former wholeness. Palimpsests can inform us, archaeologically, of the realities of the built past.

Broadley’s use of colour (or rather the lack of it) in his photographs is mostly restricted to whites, greys, blacks and a particular Chanel-like scarlet. His studio reflects this with red objects carefully chosen – The White Stripes of art.

Broadley’s paintings however, while muted of palette, hold reference to early 20th century British painting, particularly his fondness for dim harmonies and gestural brushmarks. Sickert, Nicholson and Lanyon all reside there somewhere, informing his palette, his rhythm and visual excitement of the mundane.

He invites us to rediscover our environment – that which surrounds us daily whether it be urban or rural. His paintings absorb the textures of their subject, largely landscapes and, through their abstraction, bring in the very scent and sounds of the land – he takes us through it, and by so doing, encourages us to engage all our senses with our visual experience.

Ivon Hitchens is there too, as is Pasmore and Piper – his paintings, like theirs, domestic in scale, scratching and spontaneous, as if the moment not captured would forever be lost, these whirring sounds, vivid smells and fading hues devoid of human incident – all about to disappear.

It was pleasantly ironic that the works shown at Martin’s Arundel studio during the Arundel Gallery Trail 2009 brought urban textures to a town not known for aesthetic vandalism.