Christian Vistan’s “from—about” is both a (poetic) inquiry into cultural transmission and an ode to painting itself, with neither taking precedence over the other. In the accompanying exhibition text, Kiel Torres writes of paint as a medium fundamentally tied to the presence of water, or lack thereof: “In our correspondence, Christian and I talked about laundry—how cycles of washing and drying accentuate the temporality of wetness. They explained how painting water extends this ephemeral wet time, offering a way to visualize liminality and articulate intangible distances.” Across the exhibition, Vistan accentuates this temporal quality of wetness through abstract representation of the aquatic, and formal techniques that call attention to paint’s liquid foundation.

In “from—about,” ideas about cultural transmission are not communicated through figuration or representation, but through subtle deployments of painterly technique. Vistan’s is a material poetics, where signification does not exclusively take place on the level of language, or of the painted figure, but through the painting’s structural supports. Wetness is further mobilized by Vistan through an engagement with the painting’s surface. The liquid contents of paint are highlighted by thin applications of tempera, watercolour, and ink over gesso that soak and wrinkle the painting’s support. In the resulting images, large swaths of colour that appear to be in a permanent state of dampness particularly echo Helen Frankenthaler’s Canal (1963) and Basin (1969), where wetness is deployed as a thematic and material concern. In Clouds (2022), muddled grey, beige, black, and eggplant-purple forms are rendered in ink, tempera, and graphite on unmounted manila paper. A sense of material fluctuation is connoted throughout the work—the manila paper appears to be soaked through with liquid, and gently sways as the gallery’s internal airflow moves beneath the image. The titular reference to clouds suggests not only geographic movement, but also water suspended in between liquid and solid forms: this is an in-between state, a gap.

We can also turn to Volcano (2022). This painting consists of a cluster of six grey circles over a muddled sky-blue background, divided up into an interlocking series of rough rectangles. Although not taking up the fiery aesthetics of what we could consider typical of a volcano, the volcano’s role as a geological creator is present in the image’s name and in its formal elements. In Vistan’s painting, we witness the stony formation of land-mass before its occupation by terrestrial life, as well as that volcanic distancing between earth and sea.

In Unfold (2022), a swath of manila paper is folded into a six-by-eight grid and emblazoned with curvilinear yellow and black forms that cut across a background of beige and off-white squares. Outlined yellow forms appear as if they are waiting to be filled in against a wash of white and off-white tempera that evokes the default colour of a canvas. Throughout the works on display, the presence of painting’s support (the canvas, the paper, etc.) is often made visible through an aesthetics of soaking, with wrinkling effects that call attention to the canvas not as a physically untethered neutral ground, but as a material that determines the image laid over it.

The use of manila paper throughout the show also gestures toward Vistan’s tongue-in-cheek interest in their familial history of migration from the Philippines. Like many other formal elements present through the show, a patchwork made by Vistan’s maternal grandmother contains abstract evocations of water, with aquatic muted colours, and a sense of movement produced from the piece being hung on the gallery door without supports. Other pieces, like Patch (Paruparo) (2022) and Patch (Baby Blue) (2022), suggest further dialogue between this entryway patchwork and its distillation into painting. We can view the patchwork by Vistan’s grandmother as the “from” in the titular “from—about” dyad. Other concerns suggested by the patch, such as cultural translation, the influence of material on form, and the deployment of water on multiple registers, reverberate around the room in a poetically elusive manner that is impossible to pin down. This makes the notion of wet time an effective metaphoric framework with which to approach the exhibition. Even between dry and solid states, paint is still inherently determined by its liquid origin. It is neither here nor there. In Vistan’s paintings, the point of departure will never be the same as the point of arrival. Instead of defining the site of “here” or “there,” “from—about” sits with the gap of transits, distance, and the state of flux.