This is Christian Ward’s second solo exhibition at Max Wigram Gallery. Known for a distinctive visual vocabulary made of broad brush-strokes saturated by technicolour palettes, Ward’s new series of paintings recall the psychedelic design of 1960s vinyl records but move away from his former pre-historical and futuristic deserts to mix styles and narratives whose conventions are inherited from Asian masters. The artist’s employment of landscape as a genre is not exhausted but re-emerges through pop culture, kitsch, science fiction and electronic music. Ward avoids preconceived ideas of nationality and presents his expressive language within a contemporary internationalist approach.

Beyond innovations which, in different degrees, try to homogenise Asian and Western forms through, for instance, the coexistence of multiple viewpoints and light games that illuminate the slow, dry curves of the canvases, Ward brings together also a typology of spaces. Deserted islands, dead caves, dooming sunsets, sunrises with no soul, abstract landscapes with no light, aerial views that play with the spatial order and scales of objects or figures, are confused by the quasi complete absence of horizon, as it appears in Orange Lake  (2005) for instance. The peculiar organisation of these paintings’ compositions suggests they are not about a place but a space. In Black Hut  (2005), for instance, the introduction of sudden changes of scale and tempo of the scenes shifts the perspective into a psychological zone. Similarly, the microscopic colonies spread across the misty ground of the diptych Island Culture  (2005) are life presences of dystopic connotation, microscopic figures that represent an idea of the East made of decayed utopias instead of spiritual communities.

By merging Western 19th century landscape painting with the richness and complexity that flourished at the height of Chinese imperial power (and which played a crucial role in the elaboration of English landscape aesthetics in the 18th century), Ward’s empty, sanitised scapes define landscape as a process in motion. Their recessive environments, dim lights, sombre tones portray the mechanisms of the human mind aspiring to no idealism or hegemony and, through a more expressionistic style, approach painting with the desire to map the dark side of landscape, the black holes of the mind.

Christian Ward (b. 1977, Noda, Japan) lives and works in London. In 2005 he will be participating in The Triumph of Painting at the Saatchi Collection at County Hall, London; Ideal Worlds at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany; Faltering Flames at Graves Gallery, Sheffield. In 2003 he was the winner of the Lexmark European Art Prize.