Sowing a Seed in a Field Made of Ash is an apt title, not just for this show, but for painting as an endeavor—How can an individual make something sprout when the whole field is already planted, grown, withered and decayed?

One solution is to make genre itself into a tool, so that it becomes the subject, means, and substrate by which painting is realized. Blair Whiteford uses genre as his brush, productively recycling foundational motifs in pursuit of his own narrative.

Referencing religious iconography from the paintings of the European Renaissance, Whiteford reimagines devotional figures, bowed and twisted in agony or adoration of the divine. Quasi-human forms kneel before judgment or rise up in ecstasy and ascension. Shining Era of Exhalation depicts a macabre pietà, foregrounding a burning and melted Calvary. In Harvest From Final Bloom, Adam wakes not to the Garden of Eden, but a barren landscape. He is not the first man on Earth; he is the last. Intimating biblical characters, Whiteford’s protagonists are tormented by the problems of a ruinous near future.

In place of a search for the divine, Whiteford’s figures evoke a different quest for meaning—Where does the body end? What happens to the flesh in an environment better suited to machines? How does one become more human, and at what cost? These are the questions of a science fiction hero, a 20th century paperback protagonist.

Whiteford mirrors the juxtaposition between future and past with the tension he creates on the canvas. He seduces with technique, embracing color and stroke to build a surface that is viscous and sensual. Then suddenly, a hard edge and a garish violet cut off an organic, meandering form. A painting that introduced itself as harmonic spreads and washes collapses under the weight of a heavy, glossy smear. The entrancing is always cut with the drip and the stain. Even where he maintains a surface, the idyllic always belies an underworld where greys and blacks dominate to gloomy effect.

It is in this field of ash that Blair Whiteford’s martyrs and alien interlopers watch the sun rise on an acid world. He has created a universe where past and future collapse and whose denizens make lives in the wreckage, patching together what remains.

- Alex Gibson