“When I make works from light boxes (such as Brick Lane Remix, 2003), or old plastic bottles with lights inside, I hope the illumination suspends their objecthood to some degree and makes the viewer see them a little differently – see them as colours before seeing them as objects.” The brightest possible palette fills the range of neon-lit columns, modular crates, spherical shapes, and unlit clusters (such as Parapillar, 2006), the artist’s “vehicles for colour.”

Batchelor is interested in reconsidering colour theories from a contemporary context, which he explores in Chromophobia (2000), a book dedicated to the subject. His dazzlingly saturated objects reconsider the tension between form and the very materiality of colour, perhaps with a wink to earlier forms of light and neon art. “I often use colour to attack form, to break it down a little or begin to dissolve it. But I am not at all interested in ‘pure’ colour or in colour as a transcendental presence… So if I use colours to begin to dissolve forms, I also use forms to prevent colours becoming entirely detached from their everyday existence.”