Themes+Projects, San Francisco, California
Continues through March 29, 2025
March 22, 2025
The admiration for paintings so ultra-realistic that they simulate photographs is given a witty reversal in Davey Whitcraft’s conceptual abstractions comprising “To Those Who Create the Future.” Whitcraft’s striking images — to all appearances tours de force of immaculately blended oil paint — turn out to be unframed, Dibond-mounted, square-format photos the size of medium canvases (from 36 x 36” to 60 x 60”). In a kind of sociopolitical camouflage, they mimic the look of ‘flat’ 1960s abstraction. Could they mark a return to art for art’s sake, a time when representation and message art were considered irrelevant and retrograde? Dressed up in such aesthetic disguise, Whitcraft gives us subject matter of disquieting contemporary import: lithium mines in the Atacama Desert along the coast of Chile; the landlocked and toxic Salton Sea in the Coachella Valley; and the oil fields of the scorching Mojave Desert. Of particular interest to Whitcraft is the Atacama lithium deposit, nationalized by Chile in order to protect it from experienced Russian and American strip-mining companies.
The geopolitical importance of petroleum energy and big data cannot be overstated, but the artist, who considers the geopolitical, economic, and environmental aspects of the coming lithium rush, prefers not to polemicize. Whitcraft wants viewers to find their way into these issues “at their own pace, in their own way,” rather than add to the overheated culture of complaint in which we all swim these days.
The paintings’ — oops, photographs’ titles denote their sources; these are, after all, landscapes, if of an unconventional nature. The colors of land and sky are combined and blended, eliminating all references to natural objects but for a hard demarcation line at the center to bottom center of the image, where dissimilar colors abut. Whitaker, who has folded his photos in the past, now employs more advanced processes and software, as well as drones. The illusion of topography results from the color mists that are grounded by faux origami pleats.
“Piedras Rojas” (Red Stones) is a rotary scan of desert oranges and purples. “Altiplánico” (High Plateau), its colors given a chiaroscuro shading, is as metallic as Fernand Léger’s early cubist works, with their polished cannons. “Valle de la Luna” (Valley of the Moon) employs a nocturnal palette of muted grays, browns and purples, possibly reflecting its dusk or sunrise shooting time. Also included are four 13 x 13” images entitled “Mino de Litio” (Lithium Mine), arranged on the wall in a grid. They are fine examples of industrial photography done artistically.
A video, “To Those Who Create the Future,” is a montage of drone shots of the desert landscape. You can sense the metamorphic and metamorphosing minerals found there, all of that trapped lithium just begging to be separated out (with the help of music by Aaron Lepley and a performance by Bob Villain). The title of the video and the show as a whole argues that creating the future by dealing with the present would be wiser than trying to restore a gilded mythical past.
Whitcraft has a complicated relationship with painting. His degrees in Media Arts (he calls it “tinkering”), Philosophy, and Critical Theory — not painting — are complemented by his experience of working with Bay Area painter Raymond Saunders, “the master of color field and gradient.” From Saunders he learned a larger lesson than technique: “My mind was blown by how interesting it was to be an artist.” Whitcraft investigates his subjects using the latest technology (Linux, computer, cinema camera, drones) and presents the results of his media research as art exhibitions. Whitcraft also enjoys painting at times, albeit he confesses, imperfectly, to work out pictorial ideas in the form of studies. Those don’t make it into the show for obvious reasons, but I understand that they garner acclaim behind studio doors from artist friends. Will they ever catch up with those photographs?
DeWitt Cheng is an art writer/critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written for more than twenty years for regional and national publications, in print and online, He has written dozens of catalogue essays for artists, galleries and museums, and is the author of “Inside Out: The Paintings of William Harsh.” In addition, he served as the curator at Stanford Art Spaces from 2013 to 2016, and later Peninsula Museum of Art, from 2017 to 2020.
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