Painter Ellon Gibbs’s recent canvases address humanity’s primal nature. Working in oil and acrylic, he paints what he calls “figures of the spirit” against “fever dreams” of colorful, sometimes fearsome, landscapes. His genderless, faceless figures assume postures such as crouching, grappling, embracing, or standing with a fist raised to the sky. Gibbs says the crouch signifies “birth, death and rebirth” — evoking the protective fetal position as well as prostrate prayer. His paintings equally acknowledge the awesome power of nature in the age of climate catastrophe. In his dynamic works, drama unfolds between human beings and their environment. 

Gibbs’s desire to return to primal figuration reflects his relationship to spirituality, as well as his research into non-Western and pre-modern traditions. He describes an embodied connection to the spirit world, expressed through a keen attunement to his physical sensations, gut intuition, and dreams. Born in New York City, his family hails from Grenada and Carriacou in the West Indies. Though he grew up going to Christian church, he says some of his relatives practiced white and black magic, known as Obeah in Grenada. Outside of his familiarity with these rituals, Gibbs studies various texts about religion, the natural world, decolonization and even medieval torture. His sources include botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and sociologist Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. The artist wishes to understand the origins of our disconnection with nature, and to repair that fractured relationship.

A metaphorical power suffuses Gibbs’s new works. In Here I’m Alive (2023), a figure stands with one arm elevated, surrounded by a wave. Though sublimely beautiful, the arcing spray of ocean threatens to overtake him. In Coming of Age (2023), drying animal skins — like those used for djembe drums — hang above a crackling fire composed of diagonal strokes. A vibrant pink twilight illuminates the scene. At a distance, on the far right, we can see the suggestion of a dark skyline. Gibbs describes a haunting feeling in his paintings, of “very saturated colors [that] jump at you, and then darkness [that] follows it. You almost have to chase the color to feel this sort of connection.” His practice revels in the tension between light and dark, silence and noise, as an analog for humanity’s fraught relationship to nature.