Martos gallery is pleased to present new paintings by Christopher Astley
from his Terrain series (2020, ongoing), along with a selection of works
from Seven Years Below (2017-2019). The exhibition runs from Feb. 15
to March 16, 2024, with an opening on Thursday, Feb. 15, from 6-8 PM.
In the Terrain paintings (2020, ongoing) Christopher Astley’s picture-
making can be described by way of a persistent visual language, not
only in relation to a recognizable vocabulary of forms and their
collaging, which gives them a sense of heightened spatial dislocation,
all within a consistent chromatic range, but in terms of a subject that
may be thought of as camouflaged. Appearances, however, are
deceiving. What are readily identified as landscapes, albeit fractured
and free-floating, metaphorically serve this artist’s concerns, both
rendered and non-pictorial. As hybrid abstract-representational scenes,
the paintings suggest fields and forests, clusters of bushes and trees,
hills and pathways, a world alternately natural and artificial. This, of
course, is the fiction of painting, connected to our abiding need to make
sense of the world around us, and no matter how disordered it initially
appears, or especially when it doesn’t at first cohere. For many viewers
these paintings will register as “landscape,” and yet they are not
primarily meant to represent nature. Rather, it is the nature of verbal
articulation and comprehension, how human thought is expressed and
received, how information is retrieved, how speech can be lost and
memory becomes unreliable, that chiefly concerns this artist, and
through which painting is his preferred mode of translation. The routes
we see criss-crossing his paintings might as well be the neural
pathways along which ideas and fears travel.
When speaking about these paintings, Astley recalls working in college
with individuals who had suffered head injuries and how this affected
verbal and visual comprehension; family and friends who have dealt
with memory loss and cognitive disintegration. All this underlies how he
apprehends the world-as-image and thus reality itself, a set of
circumstances always subject to change, often unpredictably. At the
same time, he is a painter, someone who finds ways to understand who
he is through the invention of images. The collage aspect of these
paintings, what we might call their visual stutter, clearly reflects the
fragmentation of modern life and the impact of technology. When
considering them we may well wonder, Has this terrain been surveilled
by drones? Does the imaging, alternately blurred and high definition,
overlay Impressionism and computer rendering, calling to mind video
games, satellite imagery and observation en plein air? That the artist
produces these works in a windowless studio also underscores a
distance on those painters who aimed to capture the ephemerality of
nature as it is. Astley returns over and again to life as it feels, and not
without trepidation, to mental precarity, human mortality, and uncertain
times. Another green world? Haven’t we been here before, though not
quite in the same way? The already buoyant Chinese landscapes of the
10th century come to mind, further unmoored. As well as Cubism,
though flattened, its facets and multiple perspectives superimposed as a
compressed topography. Perhaps surprisingly, or not, Astley is a fan of
the cartoonist and pioneering animator Winsor McCay, famous for the
character Little Nemo. In one story, he has to make his way through a
dense forest of towering mushrooms, inadvertently causing them to
collapse on top of him. Startled awake, he realizes that he had only
been dreaming. (Astley might interpret this as a flash-back to a
psychedelic experience.) In a McCay cartoon that pictures a young boy
about to sneeze, the very frame around the illustration’s final panel is
shattered by his convulsion. For Astley, this would seem to confirm that
accepted reality is conditional, that art has the power to expand and
transform consciousness: drugs without having to take them.
The paintings that comprise the series Seven Years Below (2017-2019),
represent battles in a way that captures the chaos, simultaneity, and
utter irreality of war. Astley has referred to the relationship between
opposing forces as “hallucinatory, calling into question the nature of the
perception of time and space, and, by extension, our conception of
history.” These scenes, particularly those featuring masted warships
and cannon, appear to be set in conflicts from the distant past. They
explode in kinetic bursts of flame and destruction. The soldiers are hazy,
faint figures, appropriately enough, apparitions, ghosts in these troubled
times haunting us still. These are history paintings for Astley, “where the
subject is not a particular event or cast of historical figures but rather the
mechanism of history itself.”
—Bob Nickas
