A Life in Fields

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA

May 2 - June 13, 2024

Darren Waterston’s A Life in Fields envisions the landscape genre as an enigmatic investigation of human consciousness. Through symphonic sweeps of color, Waterston creates “devotional” paintings and works on paper that rely on the sublime to survey the human psyche. Each painting embraces the unresolved nature of conscious experience, using color as a stepping stone towards investigating our psychological interiorities.

Describing this body of works as “palette-driven,” Waterston experiments with bursts of explosive color—crystalline cyans, mossy greens, and hot pinks—that mirror the complexities of an inner psychological world, refracting emotion and sensation through color. Colors are paired to exist slightly outside the purview of visual accord, demonstrating Waterston’s ongoing interest in beauty and terror’s reciprocity. The colors further evoke this spectral symbiosis: bruisy mauves suggest viscerality, working as a bridge between the sensory and the psychological; golds recall alchemy, evincing both overindulgence and regeneration; the scarlet flashes in Field 2 and Metamorphose Trilogy 1 could be read as expressions of passion or carnage. Because Waterston considers the paintings complete only with the viewer’s experience of the work, the ultimate interpretation is reflexive and interdependent, homed in the viewer’s perception and relationship to the work both as text and object.