the utopian tense of green

The narratives of nineteenth century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt on his travels in the tropics are filled with "the splendours of the vegetation's colouring"; he produced seven volumes on botany alone. Countless tones of green fill his pages: seductive green, as in the green jade stones of the Amazon; colonial green, as in the Queen's Gardens, an island covered with pines and "deep green lining peaks" where von Humboldt finds "contrasts with the white, barren sands"; "extensions of rich green carpets," and above all the famous Esmeralda, a place on the Orinoco river in which everyone dreamed of El Dorado, a South American utopia. Esmeralda was actually a misnomer, with its granite rock crystal misidentified as emerald, a green "mineralogical error" in Humboldt's words. I'm neither nostalgic for the idea of a return to an untouched, essential nature, nor am I interested in blueprints for the future, the totalitarian failures that lined modernism. What matters to me is how utopia can function as a critique of what is present. In this new series of paintings and drawings on linen, bamboo panels and duralar, I imagine green through a looking glass, refracted, as a matter of survival. Organic geometries look back into the promise and fall of modernism and forward into the future, green. Possibility, contingency: the utopian tense. I conceive utopia as an abstraction, as the non-place that is also a place of paradox, one conceived through poetic effort, one that gestures toward a constructive world of becoming. If monochrome black stood for painting's exhaustion and disenchantment, green signals the technology of renewal.