John Denniston II. White Lies

About

Centered around light, the works in this show aim to challenge, subvert and dissect how this both physical and psychological element  has historically been used in painting.  

Each monumental work builds a case around a specific notion of our  understanding of luminous phenomena, whether it is through a stained glass window, a slippage or a sunburn. As such, the paintings dance with classical systems of how light is depicted, and dance with them right into their own shortcomings. 

Constructed as allegories, the works shift the viewer’s gaze from outward to inward as the way they are painted becomes conceptual. Denniston reckons with the idea that the way we see is not by neutral means, creating an enigma out of the relationship between content and its depiction. Using painting in this way is a practice shared by artists such as Maleko Mokgosi and Vincent Desiderio, whom Denniston most differs from in where he applies a techno-conceptual pressure. In his work, viewers can expect to find visual cues in the form of composition, illusionistic space, and brushwork that generate a playground of ideas, oriented towards a criticism of our most basic understanding of light, and by extension, its symbolism in culture. 

The investigation begins with case one, “Block”, depicting a green screen obscuring a figure in a dreamlike residential background. Occupying the majority of the canvas, the green screen becomes the focal point in the artist’s composition, contrasting the exaggerated one point perspective beside it. Present in a number of his exhibited works, Denniston uses the flat purple mountain as a symbolic shorthand of the modern U.S. as a way to locate the paintings in space and time. “Slippage” follows this trajectory as the green screen is painted from its back side, still partially present despite having fallen out of its own silhouette. In the midst of slipping into oblivion, the negative space created in its silhouette reveals behind it a past history of a larger instance of collapse. “Ultraviolet”, a series of three larger than life Vitruvian portraits, uses direct lighting to depict sunburnt humans as personifications of an overexposure to information. As a near universal symbol of knowledge or truth, light is mistaken to be a merely visual phenomena, but the “Ultraviolet” series displays the adverse effects that ultraviolet light has on the human body. Despite being sunburnt, these resilient models painted from life pose defiantly, as if to suggest they can assuredly withstand the troubles of the present moment.