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 crisscrossing 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 troubles 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