joseph scissorhands: Chris Rivers: Odyssey

Sunday 30 January 2022

Chris Rivers: Odyssey

Angels are Astronauts - Saturn (detail)

Whilst in Fitzrovia I happened across Pontone Gallery and was very impressed by the paintings of Chris Rivers. This body of work references themes of space travel and the artists' vision of the atmospheres and presumed gases and toxic clouds enveloping the different planets inhabiting our solar system. The first thing that leaps out at you are the vibrant colour harmonies Rivers has employed to evoke the misty nebulae and cosmic dust of the planets. There are sulphurous yellows and acidic greens contrasted against vortices of hot pinks and flashes of scarlet. The next element to catch the eye is the artists impressive gestural, bravura brushwork which deliberately verges on the abstract. The gallery's press release of the exhibition mentions the influence of Monet's Waterlily series of paintings which is very evident, but I also detected a possible connection to the blowsy romantic excesses of French Rococo paintings by the likes of François Boucher (1703–1770) and Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) in Rivers treatment of the colouring of the skies and the depictions of roses and foliage suspended in the firmaments of these worlds. Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey is also a deliberate influence here as we observe lone spacemen in each painting cut off off from all other human contact in cold, alien spacescapes. There was something oddly affecting about the plight of these tiny spacemen on their personal odyssey's hurtling alone through the immense vastness of space. I felt this was quite a timely exhibition and body of work given the recent launch into space of the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope is expected to reach a distance of of approximately 664,000 miles from Earth and use its gold-coated mirrors to look back through time to see the embers of the stars that formed after the Big Bang leading to the birth of the universe.