For Message From the Source Deanna Havas presents a series of paintings partly inspired by themes from Vincent van Gogh’s late works, interpreted through a combination of freeware graphics, unlicensed commercial stock photography and Photoshop effects.

In “Enhanced Serenity” a digitally doctored photo of the sun’s heavenly rays appears facetuned, the latest to fall victim to our narcissistic culture. The sun, long a metaphor for truth and life, now distorts all that is illuminated by its path.

At the earthly level Havas’ reference to van Gogh, for whom potatoes and wheat fields represented the peasantry, something bound to earth, is clear. Yet van Gogh’s beloved proles are nowhere to be found. In “Success Consciousness” a disembodied corporate board hovers over a place they may have once toiled, indicating that the salt of the earth may have finally lost its savor.

In the past, still lifes and genre scenes were relegated to the lowest rungs in the hierarchy of paintings. Distinct from the high status reserved for history painting, they depicted commoners and objects in ordinary, even banal, situations.

In our post-historical moment the spirit of this content reappears, with a vengeance, glamorized by glossy product advertisements, supermarket consumer experiences, and trash television scenarios. The hyperreal, billboard-sized imagery of produce featured in the “Untitled” works pays homage to the triumph of this content.

Havas asserts a trajectory of aesthetics first championed by Post-Impressionists straight through to the present day as the output of billion-dollar industries. Rather than emotional brushwork, however, we encounter subjectivity as truth.

— Lukas Wagner