Mankind the Opera — Views from Nowhere, An Epoch of Rest 2023-2025

These new paintings extend the world of The Immortal Mortals series, restaging its cast of figures in imagined opera sets, composed, deliberately lit, each canvas its own scene. Where The Immortal Mortals were dark, its figures caught in shadow, uncertain, here the set has changed. The darkness has gone. What remains are colour fields, layered blues, reds, and greenish tints that echo sky, leaf, light. The figures, still in their familiar sculptural breastplates, no longer appear stranded or embattled. They observe. They stand beside ghost animals. They look into light. One holds a flower. There is stillness here, but not inertia, a resting alertness. The title plays on William Morris’s novel News from Nowhere, a vision of a post-industrial utopia free from mechanised drudgery. But “nowhere” has a second resonance now, the placeless realm of generated content and AI simulation. Increasingly, we inhabit a virtual nowhere, an ambient, unlocated time-stream. In such a world, being and nothingness feels less like philosophy and more like a condition. These paintings don’t reject that future, but they offer something inside it: care, form, presence. A raised hand. A grazing shadow. A resting stone. An epoch of rest, Morris’s phrase, reimagined not as utopia but as interval, between acts. This might be where we end up. And maybe that’s enough.