(An extract from the Chroma Keys exhibition catalogue 1993, the text is by George Mallalieu, George was at that time Principle Lecturer in Fine Art at Staffordshire University):

Some of the most profound technological changes of the last thirty years have occurred within the media industry. The impact has been cultural, political and geographic, and has now stabilized into a cohesion of integrated information industries that includes show-business.

It has been left to Stephen Boyd's generation, to grow up with and bear witness to this explosive social cocktail and attempt to generate a critical culture that will carry their criticism and hopes.

Training as a figurative painter at the Glasgow School of Art during the late seventies would seem like an unlikely preparation for developing a plausible critical language for our time, least of all a visual language. For surely the least appropriate language available is that of figurative painting based upon techniques and principles unchanged since the Renaissance.

The relevance of this practice to a contemporary critical culture is what Boyd has been determined to establish since leaving art college. He has stripped it of it's domestic expectations, celebrated it's history, and reminded us that all narrative points necessarily towards a future. Robert Hewison's generic title of Social Surrealism for the practice of artists with similar concerns seems inadequate to Boyd's programme; as deflationary as the balloon in one of the recent pieces, 'Barrage'. So we are left without a category, an ism, an identity tag. We don't know where we stand. And I believe that that is exactly what these paintings are about.