At the centre of the project lie hundreds of over overpainted and collaged tabloid newspapers. ‘The Dark Times’ began in January 2007, when Sakoilsky doodled ‘The Dark Times: London’s only truly independent newspaper’, after wiping a paintbrush on a free London tabloid while painting a canvas. This was the beginning of a 16 year continuous series of history-newspaper-paintings, that have graced the walls of exhibitions in squats, galleries, palazzos, public institutions (& exist in private collections) across Europe. “The subversive media hijackings of [his] potlatch newspaper” are “at once satire and psycho-social investigation. He simplifies and emphasises, with a vicious joy to the use of colour and desperate relish to the distortion of text. Sinners are transformed into saints, saints into sinners. Anger is fused with humour. Banality becomes profound” – critique and anarchic painterly celebration splashed across the daily pages. The works have a lineage tracing back to the visceral, scurrilous political satires of the 18th Century. Their aesthetic ranges from carefully honed detournement: post-letrist/siuationist, -fluxus, also post-pop, post-punk, dark-pop; to ‘informal’, gestural action painting. All literally mediated by the daily tabloid newspapers, out of which, and on which they are created. They chart, simultaneously, a personal journey of the London based artist and the interpersonal/historical. ‘The Dark Times 2007-2023’ exist as a vital aesthetic-historic document and running commentary of early 21st century Britain, ‘UK plc’, and beyond. “ Paul Sakoilsky has made performances and paintings as hybridised "autopsies" of media images, in visceral terms, that act upon the daylight utopias of consumerism and media ideology. His on-going project the dark times is a newspaper in the potlatch spirit, described in the terms of Jean Baudrillard's concept of hegemony, as an ultimate debasement of value.”   Peter Lewis, 2011.