Clive Head is the leading figurative painter of his generation working in Britain today. In this introduction to his recent work Michael Paraskos discusses the various influences on Head as a painter, ranging from Titian to Matisse. He argues that Head’s ambition to create paintings that exist as an alternative reality to our own plunges the viewer into a parallel universe every bit as strange and exciting as that dreamed up by Lewis Carroll. In doing so, Paraskos suggests, Head has enabled painting to follow the other arts in finally grasping the full implications of the concept of mise en abyme, theorised by the influential French critic Roland Barthes, while still producing images that are deeply compelling.