Paintings 2024-2025
“SEE WHO GIVES A FUCK.” No period, no exclamation point, no question mark.
In his fifth solo show with LaMontagne Gallery, Joe Wardwell mixes language, landscape, and abstraction to grapple with the state of the nation. Clipped text from poetry, lyrics, and public discourse reveal the landscapes of the American collective consciousness. An American painter, with work oscillating between passion and ambivalence, Wardwell has created new paintings that are perpetually, purposefully unresolved. As he says of the text of Just Chill (2025):
the words that Snoop Dogg repeats in “Nuthing but a G Thang,” could be interpreted as a flippant dismissal of the chaos of a world spiraling beyond our control, or a plea for the chaotic world to slow down and allow us to relax even just for a moment. This ambiguity of intent is precisely what I want us to contemplate. As we follow the painter’s lead, the paintings get louder to compete with the deafening and deadening cynicism, violence, and absurdity that is political discourse today. In these paintings, life and art combine to hold the dissonance of the world, but also the quiet moments that consider the elegance of a line, a combination of colors, or the sorrow and joy of living with uncertainty.
While Wardwell’s painting has always been fueled by rock and roll, louder forces are at play here. We may feel the post-punk catharsis of the Gang of Four’s lyric “What We All Want” floating above snow-capped mountain peaks, but as the artist intimates through the dissolution of this massive image, by shouting we often fail at being heard. These paintings bear witness to the whispers between two people, talking about the change around them but drawing solace too from the conversation, the recognition, and the rest. Again, we are asked to consider ambiguity and intent.
Ambiguity, rumination, contemplation, pleasure, desire, fear … the themes that return in Wardwell’s exhibition will never be understood if we are only looking for what’s hidden to be exposed, from one assertion to its opposite. If, as another of this year’s paintings tells us, there is a CHANCE THAT THINGS WILL GETWEIRD (2025) it’s going to involve more than two options. Wardwell’s work gives us the world as what it is while allowing us to yearn for what is not yet discernible. There is nothing weird about deciding yes or no, nor does he favor order to chaos. The loss of sense, “I KIND OF LOOSE MY MIND (2025); certainty, DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED (2025); and community, NO ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT US (2025) upon which
these paintings have been built forces the viewer to contend with confusion on multiple fronts. Wardwell calls on the histories of abstraction to blow open the binaries, let in the chaos, and still persuade us to breathe. Each time a hard edge, sprayed mist, or steeped wash makes contact with landscape or language, we witness the truth of ridiculous metaphors that fill our lungs with what we see. Wardwell responded to our present moment with paintings that call out with anger, resentment, uncertainty, and with humor. After all, what might we do
better in the face of our burning forests and threatened democracy if we listened more closely to The Cars? Perhaps we should have.
Wardwell’s work layers through stencils images of landscape that are both familiar and personal but also iconic of the American pastoral. Overlayed with layers and layers of sprayed paint with geometric patterning, the work recalls both minimalist and geometric abstraction as well as second generation color field painting. The delicacy and exactitude of this work is reminiscent of of traditional Japanese wood block prints with the mountain scene built out of richly colored stencils. An image of Mount Rainier in Washington State is clearly akin to an image of Mount Fuji by Hokusai. This inventive new process of creating a “woodblock” like
painting at such a larger scale is unique to Wardwell’s paintings and a testament to the endurance of a process that will not shy away from the labor that is also art. In a world reeling from AI, Wardwell reminds us, stubbornly so, that the hand of the artist, the laborer, the woodworker, the printmaker, the sculptor may yet remind us of what is uniquely human.
Also included in this exhibition are Wardwell’s first foray into sculpture, the hand-carved marble Equity Belongs (2025). Like his painted texts, the letters that spell out the title shift between positive and negative shapes invite metaphors of presence and absence, life and loss, value and disdain. Equity Belongs is part of a body of work for which Wardwell culls the word lists used by the Department of Government Efficiency to target and cancel grant funding. Wardwell’s wife, who has been contributing to the good of society in medical research at MASS General for the past twenty years, her work, like that of so many others in the health science fields, has been threatened. For Wardwell, the turn to DOGE and marble is political and personal. There is no ambiguity here, in a time of 3D printing Wardwell picked the historical art of stone carving to speak to the short-sighted transactional vision that has overtaken this country and so much of the world.
In the end, perhaps we cannot SEE WHO GIVES A FUCK (2025). It won’t be clarified with punctuation, but we can be rest assured that at least one person, one artist, cares.