Chris Rivers | Supernova (PT 1)

Chris Rivers’ ten year career traces a specific developmental arc through a sequence of content that results in a series of distinct thematic episodes.
These range from initial forays into industrial landscape, through turbulent images of ‘celestial creatures’ such as cherubs, skeletons and astronauts tumbling through the numinous voids of cosmic space, to specific incidents of British history. Recent narrative excursions concern themselves with astrological lore and maps of the stars. More recent still are his current pictures that explore British myth, folklore and legend.

Rivers’ trademark is his gestural handling of vigorously applied oil paint that articulates pulsating clouds of intense, vaporous colour. His is a sumptuous palette that deploys rich ultramarines, rosy pinks, dusty ochres and strategic flashes of blood orange against washes and veils of viridian green, chalky cerulean blue and astringent violets. As well as referencing Romantic masters of the nineteenth century his method adds a twentieth century agitation to the facture of the painted surface by way of a loose, broad and expressive use of singular brushmark, scumble and glaze.

This overview of a young artist’s work gives us an insight into an ongoing project that maps some particular interests that are typical of the British Romantic imagination. Correspondences can be made with Turner’s obsession with the heroic journey through an elemental land and sea-scape, and also with John Martin’s apocalyptic visions. Both present us with the awe inspiring physicality of the sublime in all its existential dread. Rivers channels this sense of the fragile human figure making its intrepid way through the mercurial, shifting uncertainty of a hostile and indifferent environment, where orientation is only provided by an infinitely-distant, glittering star.