WHO is Sahaja Budzilla? “Hard nut from Liverpool, now a Buddhist. Crazy work – exciting, actually,” ran Greg McGee’s enticing if brief introduction to his latest artistic discovery for the walls of According To McGee, in Tower Street, York.

“I met Sahaja after he’d exhibited at Dean Clough in Halifax. The fearless, hilarious and disturbing vibes in his work caught my imagination for weeks, and Dean Clough artist Jake Attree and I visited him in his Elland home,” Greg later expanded.

“His personality and his paintings are two very similar beasts: his charisma fills a room and his painting is instantly thrilling. In many ways, it’s perfect for us here at According to McGee.”

Assessing Sahaja’s painting and sculpture in his York solo-show debut, Greg says: “I think perhaps we may have caught this fascinating man and his art early, maybe too early to flag him up as an established and important artist of the North, but a key figure he will be. I'd bet my last pair of boots on it. He has everything the northern art scene needs – authentic zeal, wisdom – and he can paint.

“It is the compulsive concern with colour that first arrests. Intense, shiny and at times captivatingly coarse, the tones are witty and confident, damaged and dirty. Sahaja pushes colour around with a showman’s aplomb: sometimes synthetic, sometimes cinematic, always fabulous.

“But this is no purveyor of brashness. Beneath the bombast there beats the heart of a painter who is in a constant search for meaning and - dare we say it in this too-cool-for- school epoch? – beauty too.”

At times informed by his spiritual beliefs, Sahaja’s work straddles the elemental world of Buddhism and the industrial, mechanoid world of expressionism, reckons Greg. “The result is fearlessly focused,” he says.

Let’s hear from Sahaja himself: “In art and in life I get to grips with what being me is. Buddhism isn’t something I go off and do. If I respond to an experience, I want it to be an authentic response. After all, ‘Sahaja’ means ‘innate’, ‘authentic’, and if my response makes things better, or if it makes things worse, I need to know why,” he says.

“Does it accord with the greater reality? Or is it false and does it miss the point? This is something I've spent my life uncovering. This is indeed life itself. It’s my expression, my meaning, and ultimately my Art.”

Greg, as ever, has the last effusive word. “Possessed with the perennial energy of the poet and the painter, Sahaja endows everything he does with a precise wildness, the kind of inventive, experimental rigour for which artists half his age would give the left side of their brain,” he says.

“According To McGee is delighted to be offering this luminous talent his first solo show in York. We’ve always championed art that is contemporary, visceral and beautifully crafted and Sahaja comes as close to harnessing our criteria as we’re going to get.

“This isn’t a one-off exhibition, a singular solo show where it’s blink and you'll miss it: this is the beginning of the next chapter of Sahaja’s wonderfully complex continuum, and a precursor for many more well deserved shows in York for years to come.”

After that build-up, how can you resist discovering Sahaja’s art between now and June 20?