In “Rio Tigre,” thick globs of fire consume a shoreline forest, while smoke clouds the skies and melts the landscape from top to bottom. Despite this catastrophic setting, there’s also a tiny man standing in a canoe, seemingly unaware or unable to grasp the destruction.
The unsettling scene is part of Alexis Rockman’s Conflagration series, which translates a distinctly contemporary sense of climate anxiety into eerie paintings. Made from oil paint and cold wax on wood, these pieces are chunky and gestural, placing human touch and material excess in direct proximity.
For nearly five decades, Rockman has rooted his practice in environmental concerns. Today, his body of work is a sort of archive of a changing climate, one in which dire warnings about a warming planet have not inspired robust action but rather entrenched us further in a cycle of denial and fatalism.
Feedback Loop, then, is an apt title for the artist’s upcoming debut at Jack Shainman Gallery. Featuring many forest fire paintings, the exhibition will span watercolors and cinematic panoramas Rockman has made throughout his career, along with works containing soil and organic matter gathered near the Great Lakes. This presents a visual timeline of the artist’s thinking on the changing climate, and of course, the newer works feel more urgent. As the years pass, the scale of devastation grows, and the diminutive animals and figures are no match for raging fires that threaten everything in their paths.
In biology, feedback loops are often categorized as either positive or negative, and Rockman suggests that we’ve entrenched ourselves in an inescapable downward spiral. Given the tiny, lone figures that occupy just a few paintings—others simply feature empty boats—he presents a world in which immense damage is done and the chance of rescue is near impossible.
But where Rockman taps into a universal imbalance through recurring motifs of fire and smoke, he’s also interested in the particular. His works are often based on specific locations like South America’s Rio Pastaza or Lake Athabasca, which borders Saskatchewan and Alberta. In this way, he homes in on the hyperlocal, drawing our attention to real places and urgently addressing what we’re already witnessing.
Feedback Loop runs from January 15 to February 28 in New York. Explore more of the artist’s work on his website.
