Why is artist Shaun Gladwell running?

“I couldn’t stay still for too long in lockdown,” Gladwell says. “As a runner you work with the situation. In fact, ultra-marathon running thrived. There are winners and losers in this game. And painting: self-isolating is just another opportunity to do more work. There are some practices that benefit from isolation and solitude.”

While he’s not one for too many running accoutrements, Gladwell does wear a nasal dilator – a black clip-on device used, supposedly, to enhance oxygen uptake. In the video, it makes him look even more lion-like. He mentions The Lion King, while I proffer The Wizard of Oz and later think of growling Aslan of Narnia. Whatever the reference, there’s much courage threaded throughout the video, at turns amusing (when Gladwell plays at urban hunter, tackling a fish burger with tomato sauce and an arrow), rousing (an impromptu street-dancing scene shot in New York) and sorrowful (the running-and-roaring sequence).

That’s not to ignore sequences in which Gladwell does a tough yoga move on some Andy Warhol-style Brillo boxes, or when he cleverly manoeuvres a wheelchair on a table-top as if it were a BMX bike. His continuing love of investigating the choreographies and meanings of human movement are there for all to see.

Part of a bigger Gladwell exhibition that features his elongated paintings leaning up against the walls of the Anna Schwartz Gallery, and an augmented reality component, Homo Suburbiensis pays homage to an eclectic suite of artists and thinkers. Gladwell is anything but glib: every brushmark, every edit, is layered with references and meanings that the more astute viewer will recognise, especially those familiar with another 13-minute film, The Perfect Human (1967), by Danish poet and experimental filmmaker Jurgen Leth.

Leth’s film – whose title is somewhat ironic – is a quasi-scientific documentary in which a well-dressed, middle-class young Danish couple are studied as if they were lab specimens. Their movements and behaviour are inspected and commented upon in a dry voiceover. “They were dressed as if they were being looked at in a zoological, anthropological way,” Gladwell says. “As if they were an exotic species from the animal kingdom.”

Gladwell’s film and paintings gently, and humorously, reference Leth’s work in numerous ways, yet the project is wholly its own thing. “I decided it would be a pretty cool self-portrait, to rethink a film through a scientific method with a voiceover, protracted takes, figures isolated in space,” Gladwell says. “The structure would use some of Leth’s voiceover but put it through the blender. It is a way of performing different acts [of movement] of great interest to me; vignettes.”

In this way it moves from the idea of the “perfect” human to the suburban human, whose everyday actions – walking, running, eating, dancing – are eventually collapsed into one sequence of movements. “It was a real experiment.”

The burger sequence, and the Brillo boxes, are nods to another work by Leth called 66 Scenes from America (1982) in which the Dane visited Andy Warhol in New York and filmed him eating a burger. While Gladwell’s version is full of humour – crumbs nestle in his beard, he licks sauce appreciatively off the arrow – the running sequences involved a degree of pain. Before shooting them, Gladwell would spend the preceding days pushing himself to the limit.

“I would run for days and days and then we would shoot, in a Butoh way, after the running – so I was exhausted before I even started. That was something I wanted to try and get in the video. A marathon. Exhaustion.” He mentions reading French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s essay America, in which the Parisian is perplexed by the American love of the marathon. Baudrillard described running as a “form of suicide”, in which all it shows is that “you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself … to prove what? That you are capable of finishing.”

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The paintings that accompany the video have involved much effort, too. Gladwell evokes 17th and 18th century painting formulas in the way he works with his oils, building up layers and providing depth to the images. These reference a diverse swag of images, from the cover of a Beastie Boys album to the graphic design of a skateboard deck given to him in London, to the packaging on a tube of oil paint.

The long, narrow canvases, in pairs, will lean against the walls, making them more like installation forms. Gladwell, as might be expected, has moved between the paintings and the video over the past year. He does some underpainting, stops, starts, films, edits, returns “in a really slow, staggered way”. And he runs. Movement, after all, is what captures him.

Homo Suburbiensis is at Anna Schwartz Gallery, February 6-April 24, annaschwartzgallery.com