By pursuing ideologically unassuming programming, Modern Art has had quite a run of excellent shows this past year. It would be unfair, however, to question the method on Simpson’s canvasses because his habit of rendering life’s dimensional interstices – doors, ladders, and chimneys – as perspectival projections developed decades before he joined Stuart Shave’s stable.

The images, some nearly as expansive as the gallery’s walls, set out simple scenes. Fragments of architecture – like a quaint library console that could have come from Arne Jacobsen’s Brutalist design for Oxford’s St Catherine’s College – appear in technical detail in some. In others, they resonate with the graphic character of advertising or agit-prop and become scenes of sin, confession, and reparation. In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, however, neither is a truer likeness of the events which Simpson deftly omits from his canvases.