About the artwork
About the artwork
BLACK MESA
In Black Mesa, JChadima reimagines the landscape through a highly personal language of colour, rhythm, and abstraction. A dark, monumental landform anchors the composition, rising against a deep red sky, while the foreground unfolds through successive bands of saturated colour. The landscape is recognizable yet deliberately transformed, shifting between observed terrain and an autonomous arrangement of form.
The painting is structured through a series of undulating planes that suggest geological strata, distant ridges, cultivated fields, and the movement of water through the land. These forms converge toward the center before expanding outward, creating an intense sense of perspective and visual movement. The imposing darkness of the mesa provides a counterpoint to the vivid oranges, yellows, greens, blues, and violets below.
The landscape is reminiscent of the expansive terrain of Colorado and New Mexico, where mesas, distant mountain forms, broad horizons, and exposed geological layers define the visual character of the American Southwest. Rather than describing a specific location, JChadima draws upon the region’s sense of scale and openness, allowing the landscape to emerge through memory, perception, and abstraction.
Colour functions independently of naturalistic description. JChadima uses heightened chromatic contrasts to establish spatial relationships and emotional intensity, allowing individual passages to operate simultaneously as landscape and abstraction. The layered forms suggest the accumulated history of the terrain, while their fluid contours soften geological permanence into something rhythmic and continually evolving.
In Black Mesa, JChadima moves beyond the depiction of a specific landscape to explore the underlying architecture of the land—its layers, divisions, horizons, and expanses. The result is a landscape reconstructed through memory and perception, where the physical world becomes a framework for an expressive investigation of colour and form.
Provenance:
CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY N° 20260903121922 | REFERENCE/ISNI: 2022-07
AKOUN CERTIFIED: 3400 Euros.
EXHIBITIONS:
2022 24th SALON DES PEINTRES DU MARAIS, HALLE DES BANCS MANTEAUX, PARIS
2022 SALON D’AUTOMNE
