Christopher Astley. Terrain

About

In the Terrain paintings (2020, ongoing) Christopher Astley’s picturemaking 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.