WALTON FORD

Ford has described Tintoretto’s Apparizione della Vergine a San Girolamo as “A poignant entry point into a visual discussion of our relationship with the natural world.” Depicting Saint Jerome in ecstasy, in the midst of a vision in which the Virgin Mary descends from heaven, the historic painting features the lion that the legend describes as befriending St Jerome after he pulls a thorn from its paw. The unlikely bond between the two characters is detailed in the The Golden Legend, a text that was widely circulated in Europe during the late Middle Ages and which has acted as a reference for Ford. Demonstrating a mastery of narrative that Ford himself shares, Tintoretto has rendered his lion in shadow. One of Ford’s new paintings—spanning almost ten feet in length—will invert the Venetian painter’s framing to powerfully foreground the animal’s experience. 

Ford’s ongoing philosophical inquiry into the ways in which we interact with and estrange ourselves from the animal species on this planet invokes one of the most urgent questions of our time. Curator Udo Kittelmann says of the project: “In search of finding analogies between the past and the present, Walton Ford’s paintings superimpose intricate natural history depictions with current perceptions and critical commentaries, as well as adding quotes from literary sources from past centuries, rendered in the style of the old masters. In his artworks, which can be seen as satires on political oppression and the exploitation of the environment, he casts doubt on the ‘ever new’ and the ‘ever better’. At the same time Ford has always been raising questions on a diverse range of expectations and established rules in contemporary aesthetics. To be precise, his paintings are a plot about the arrogance of human nature. Yesterday, today and tomorrow.”