Immersive and relentless, the paintings, videos and installations of Sam Songailo arrest our attention through both their sheer intensity and their tremendous associative powers. While clearly linked to a number of key antecedents (the work of Bridget Riley and the wall paintings of Sol LeWitt for example), Songailo’s work employs a distinctly personal aesthetic that owes as much to various imagined futures of film and literature as it does to the past. A number of commentators (including Songailo himself) have highlighted the futuristic character of the artist’s work, but to what future does it belong? Not the ray-gun Gothic of 1950s science-fiction, nor a post- apocalyptic dystopia. Songailo’s vision more closely resembles what we thought the future might be like in the eighties: the neon noir of Blade Runner, the cyberspace of Tron, even the 2015 posited by Back to the Future II (at the time of writing, amusingly imminent).