Untitled (Massacre des Blancs par les Noirs) . 2020
White’s paintings traffic in the deliberate misuse of grids, the enduring and hyperrational framework of traditional Western art. White applies a rubber-paint admixture to a mesh overlay from the reverse side, pushing the material through the latticed grid and onto the work’s surface. Breached by veins of polychrome paint, the mesh oozes with the material legacy of colonial extraction on rubber plantations in Brazil and Congo. Screens intended as barriers—to keep out bugs, nature, “wild” things—instead yield the pockmarks of a glowing moon or the figures in a nineteenth-century Sioux bear dance.
Lucy Hunter
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