Oliver Vernon is a follower of chaos, the random gestures of a chance effect provide the core direction and composition of much of his art, or rather the struggle to contain and perfect structure and form from that original event. Primarily a painter, Vernon’s influences take as much from comic and graffiti art as well as graphic design as it does say from Abstract Expressionism. 

There are elements of Futurism in his work which for me, being drawn upon influences of a technological society rather than the aspirations and glorifications of a vision of a ‘machine age’ are both more successful in conception and completion, Being of a time where nature and artifice battle for dominance in a mostly sterile and corporate world, a clash between the wet dreams of corporate retail environments and street art, Vernon’s imagery reflects our lives, albeit in an abstract fashion, immersed and enmeshed in a stream of continual architectural and social reinvention.

His work responds to an expectation of the artificial, an augmented reality of digitised celebrities and CGI enhanced Hollywood movies, an entanglement of the very engineering of today’s society from all quarters of industry and leisure. For what is our generation’s landscape if it is not the conflicting mass of one corporate agenda against another. Convenience has cost us dear, the irony that we may view the remains of the natural habitat around us via a car on a motorway, or the brief respite of open land between the tunnelling ride of an intercontinental train, the view from a skyscraper window, or the letterbox perspective of a flat screen television.

The spine of much of Vernon’s paintings offer a transitory parallel with the thin and ethereal threads of humanity in its most natural form, the physicality of the senses, non-verbal communication, the simplest pleasures of eating, sleeping, connecting with others on the most innate and instinctual of consciousnesses. This spine of natural and spontaneous being is cloaked within a framework of clustered repetition, artifice and plasticised architecture forming both bridges and tunnels of social expectation, transversely consuming space in the name of necessity and utility, which ultimately induces submission by the individual and mass at large. Ancient mankind may at first glance witness the wonders of our cities, the beauty of glass towers glinting in a strange and multi-coloured smog, but soon they too would learn that innately we have built ourselves a prison, a cage of unfathomable vision and expense that will one day prove to serve as our downfall.

The cacophony of progress has depleted much of what is most fundamental to the continuation of life on this planet, the moment the power runs out, or the groundwater is too polluted to consume, the day that the world economy finally collapses under the false tenet that growth is sustainable, or that politicians can no longer inspire the trust of the people, our greatest triumphs will become our greatest nightmare. The cities will be ablaze with destruction and violence, almost nowhere will be capable of supporting life within the metropoli of the USA, China, Europe and beyond. The people will flee towards the last remnants of nature in a vain attempt to subsist. At that moment the artificiality of our present culture will flail from the surface of architectural might, as with say the Ancient Britons, stone temples, roads and aqueducts were dismantled almost immediately after the collapse of the Roman Empire, so will the same happen to our own grand hive.

Yet in that chaos there is beauty, as if witnessing vast biological processes or chemical reactions on a global scale, Vernon’s work allows the viewer to emotively hypothesise on all manner of hybrid symbolism, iconographic relativism, and visual apparatus from every field of endeavour be it maps, engineering blueprints, architectural drawings or microscopic data of unknown context, resulting in a free-for-all of colour, form, iconography and composition. Alluding to the precepts of perspectival laws, Vernons’s paintings emulate physical depth, distance and space without purpose, without the next for the cumbersome traditions of form versus function. Both are one and the same viewed from different subjective states.

Oliver Vernon is a veritable Hadron Collider of the visual arts, smashing together the very atoms of what we believe to be the perceptual reality around us, emotively charged and seductively infused with all the colours of a neon sky, pierced by the aspirations of man pulled to the very core by our fears of imbalance and our civilisation’s proverbial fear of heights yet unattained. We are the precipice, Oliver Vernon provides visual cues, maps to remonstrate our path towards, in and beyond the natural disaster of the devolution of progress.

View more of Oliver Vernon’s paintings at www.oliververnon.com.

This post is tagged abstract, Oliver Vernon, painting, www.oliververnon.com