kenneth whyte

Central to the way we visualise our histories, Modernity is a constant thread among the shifting attitudes and new discoveries which perpetually alter the past as much as the present and future.

Landscape painting during the Enlightenment captured such shifts contemporaneously, in a time when conceptions of a perfect(ed) society stopped being conceived as previous, simpler era (Eden), or somewhere beyond time (Heaven), and came to be sited in the future. A perfect(ed) society thus became an achievable goal, ultimately resulting in a concept of history and Modernity as a progressive move towards (some form of) Utopia. As a direct consequence Neo-Classical painting, and the styles derived from it, can be seen to embody the central tenets of Western Civilisation (We are the Heirs to Rome, and Civilisation, we are Modern).

And the new Utopias which blossomed would not be like the old, a Golden Age of idleness and play, but one of action, our emancipators would now be engineers and town planners. It is a continuing source of disappointment that the transition from schematic to physical reality rarely fulfils the promise of the original vision. All plans and proposed systems, the most ambitious Regeneration Masterplan or the simplest design for a domestic device, are inherently Utopian; propositions for the future, visions of the future.

Reality corrupts, so that when an object is lifted from a drawing and constructed in “the real” it instantly falls backwards through time, ages; its past consumes and soils it, claims ownership by robbing it of its place in the future.

The Architectural forms in Kenneth Whyte’s work makes no such promise; they can never exist in any environment. Instead, they will always be projected into the future, their surfaces forever unmarked by a history, immune to physics and entropic decline.

In this context Enlightenment period landscapes are employed as a backdrop to an exploration of how the Man-Made has become integral to our understanding of Modernity and the way its articulation is often used to invoke an “ecstasy of the future.”  Neither the landscapes and the architecture are more plausible than each other, symbolizing a particular frame of mind; romantic and fanciful but ultimately doomed. Trapped in paint and painting, where an everlasting system, an Eternal Present, can exist.