JOHN DENNISTON II

White Lies

March 30th - April 27th 2024

Swivel Gallery is thrilled to present John Denniston II’s solo exhibition.

Centered around light, the works in this show aim to challenge, subvert and dissect how this both physical and psychological element  has historically been used in painting.  

Each monumental work builds a case around a specific notion of our  understanding of luminous phenomena, whether it is through a stained glass window, a slippage or a sunburn. As such, the paintings dance with classical systems of how light is depicted, and dance with them right into their own shortcomings. 

Constructed as allegories, the works shift the viewer’s gaze from outward to inward as the way they are painted becomes conceptual. Denniston reckons with the idea that the way we see is not by neutral means, creating an enigma out of the relationship between content and its depiction. Using painting in this way is a practice shared by artists such as Maleko Mokgosi and Vincent Desiderio, whom Denniston most differs from in where he applies a techno-conceptual pressure. In his work, viewers can expect to find visual cues in the form of composition, illusionistic space, and brushwork that generate a playground of ideas, oriented towards a criticism of our most basic understanding of light, and by extension, its symbolism in culture. 

The investigation begins with case one, “Block”, depicting a green screen obscuring a figure in a dreamlike residential background. Occupying the majority of the canvas, the green screen becomes the focal point in the artist’s composition, contrasting the exaggerated one point perspective beside it. Present in a number of his exhibited works, Denniston uses the flat purple mountain as a symbolic shorthand of the modern U.S. as a way to locate the paintings in space and time. “Slippage” follows this trajectory as the green screen is painted from its back side, still partially present despite having fallen out of its own silhouette. In the midst of slipping into oblivion, the negative space created in its silhouette reveals behind it a past history of a larger instance of collapse. “Ultraviolet”, a series of three larger than life Vitruvian portraits, uses direct lighting to depict sunburnt humans as personifications of an overexposure to information. As a near universal symbol of knowledge or truth, light is mistaken to be a merely visual phenomena, but the “Ultraviolet” series displays the adverse effects that ultraviolet light has on the human body. Despite being sunburnt, these resilient models painted from life pose defiantly, as if to suggest they can assuredly withstand the troubles of the present moment. 

“Bodegón” is Denniston’s investigation into the traditional Spanish still life genre, a genre which relies on the chiaroscuro method to create space between figures, objects and the dark abyss of a background. The explicit function of chiaroscuro is to negate the surroundings into darkness in order to accentuate the contents of the painting.

This is a method which Denniston subverts by doubling the traditional domestic background into a glowing object of stained glass, overlaying another scene of a midnight rocky coast. Not only are the figures flattened into silhouettes behind the stained glass, but the still life objects are heavily obscured by being backlit by stained glass. “Innocent X” is the fifth and final case which portrays luscious pink curtains in a stage setting that is spotlit, revealing three vicious dogs attacking a suited man.

The man portrayed is Pope Innocent X, referenced from the famed portrait by Velásquez. Of interest in this portrait is the account given of the pope’s reaction to seeing it, where he reportedly exclaimed “Too real! Too real!” as if the painting captured his aged and angry appearance more accurately than he would allow himself to know. In Denniston’s version of “Innocent X” however, he inserts the Pope into this stage-like setting as a way of confusing the performative with the real, or, depending on the viewer, identifying it as real. 

Thinking of light as a mere optical phenomena is a misapprehension, but we accept it into our symbolic universe as a kind of “white lie”, one that we ignore out of convenience. But what if this white lie, this fallacy commonly known to represent rationality and truth, has indeed shaped our conception of that which it symbolizes. In other words, are we to believe our misunderstanding of light is nothing more than a scientific technicality, or might this be one of a series of errors that offer insight into some of the hardships which we face today?

John Denniston II (b.1999) uses oil paint as a medium to improvise within realistic picture-making structures. By staging scenes of chaotic abstraction from classic formulas, he challenges the ideological implications founded in historic painting practices, opening within them a surreal scene of figurative possibilities. The manipulation of linear perspective and color temperature instill his canvases with a sense of spatial contradiction and narrative disarray, and become disruptions through which Denniston II offers criticism on topics of the Enlightenment and other 20th century catastrophes. In taking on the discourses of philosophy and anthropology with an artist’s introspection and imagination, he pressures the ability of paint to evoke the conceptual out of the formal, generate new commentaries, and lighten the weight of burdensome logic. Denniston II’s work has been presented recently in solo exhibitions at Swivel Gallery, Strada (2023), and The Emerson (2022), and has also featured in group shows at Swivel (2022), Pratt Institute galleries (2022, 2021, 2020) and Gallery House (2019, 2021). He received his BFA in painting from Pratt Institute in 2022, and has taken intensive courses with The Art Digger Lab (2021), MICA (2016), Academy of Art University (2015) and Art Center College of Design (2013-2014).