Gregory Hodge is remarkably nonchalant for an artist who has sold out all three of his recent solo exhibitions.
The first two were in the expatriate painter's current base in France, while a third in Melbourne opened last week - by which time buyers had already snapped up every canvas.
It's great, said Hodge, but for him, the artworks are less about sales and more about trying to work out the technical puzzles of painting.
"This is a really important time for me, in terms of resolving some really complex painterly things," he told AAP.
His latest exhibition, Through Surface - open at Sullivan+Strumpf in Melbourne until December - features some of his largest artworks.
The monumental abstracts hint at representation, with vibrant swirls of paint in the foreground suggesting ribbons tossed in the air.
"They signal the action of painting but they also have an illusionistic trait in that they look like pieces of fabric at the same time," the Canberra-born artist said.
Hodge, 41, has become known for these flowing compositions, but look closer and in the background are sunflowers from the local florist, what could be a forest landscape, and scraps of material found in his daughter's fabric box.
These are fragments from life in Paris, where he relocated in 2019 with his wife, two-time Archibald finalist Clare Thackway, and their two children.
The couple have become part of a long line of Australian expat artists in Paris, stretching back to E Phillips Fox and John Longstaff in the 1880s.
They have set up home in the historic 4th arrondissement, with a studio in an industrial area a half-hour bike ride away, and are slowly becoming part of the city's international artistic community.
Back in Australia during this time, Hodge's paintings have been selling on the secondary market at well above estimates - in the case of Ocean Town, 2021, a reported $32,500 including buyer's premium.
But Hodge is resisting any temptation to bump up his prices.
"My career is long so there's no rush," he said.
"You have to think about it in those terms ... I'm not jumping to any conclusions."
The works on display in Melbourne showcase a new development in his painterly problem-solving, with the paint surface initially appearing to be fabric, perhaps a tapestry or carpet.
It's the result of a technique he has come up with using translucent acrylics applied by dragging pieces of cut perspex across the canvas.
His Pattern in a Landscape, a finalist in the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2023, references 17th and 18th-century tapestries using this method.
It's just one of the painter's DIY trade secrets, which includes the use of multi-headed paintbrushes.
Unusually, Hodge paints the foreground elements first and masks them off while he layers the background, resulting in a sharp delineation that makes colours look as though they are stuck onto the canvas.
It's all designed to appear expressionistic and spontaneous, yet these paintings are anything but - the largest in the Melbourne show took about a month to execute.
The process itself - making collages and tools - is important, as is the way these painstaking steps are referenced in the finished canvas, Hodge said.
"When you think about how they are done, there are weird visual impossibilities that happen on the surface, and they are definitely complicated," he said.
Gregory Hodge: Through Surface is on at Sullivan+Strumpf Melbourne until December 2.
