Green is pleased to present to you No more, not yet – painting on paperan exhibition of new work by Jonathan Wateridge, is on view at the Amsterdam gallery until March 28, 2026. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery and his first in Amsterdam.
The exhibition focuses primarily on Wateridge’s drawings on paper, which are an intrinsic part of his practice. While working on the larger canvases, Wateridge documented the changes throughout the creative process and the slow, consuming process of altering the figures and backgrounds in the composition. Many paintings on paper are based on these erased moments, on the ghost of previous decisions that occurred on the canvas, and become a way of rematerializing lost states.
In these paintings, the stage in which the characters appear appears to be typical of medieval Los Angeles, yet imbued with a sense of the uncanny. In fact, often opulent environments are not places of rest but tense psychological dioramas in which something ominous lurks. exist fold and glass houseSpectral figures are staggered across the depth of field, as if dispersed or diverted from the gathering of gleaming modernist glass towers in the background. The style of dress in the painting often suggests guests at a social event, but this event is disrupted, and the figures’ arms are held or swung to suggest sudden movements or moments of pause. The composition is driven by narrative, but the viewer cannot quite calculate it, and this resistance to ready interpretation adds to a sense of unease.
Treatments of the figures’ faces vary from tonal hints of eye sockets, noses and mouths to more limited features that, while intact, still seem to dissolve into themselves. For example, in foreshockThere is a painful expression on the scarlet face, the mouth is slightly open, the brows are furrowed, and the eyes may be closed. The suit-clad figure rushes out of a set of office blinds, which themselves have begun to twist, as if the world is falling apart around him. Pout, red lips and raised eyebrows on face inside and outside Easier to identify, giving the audience a clearer sense of her appearance, but not fully revealing her character.
tangled limbs two numbers Their human forms are seen intertwined, with only glowing outlines indicating where one body ends and the other begins. Looping, continuous lines draw attention to the sculptural shape of the interior, which is illuminated by the simple lampshade shape in the upper left corner. The bodies are in motion, abstracted and rendered in unnatural colors, again suggesting a dreamlike atmosphere, the warm tones also contributing to the emotional tone of the composition.
the title of the program, No more, not yetOn the one hand, it refers to the fact that, as mentioned earlier, works on paper are often either studies for a lost painting “after” or studies for larger works in the future – they always exist as possibilities. But it’s also about the moment where many of the characters find themselves at an inflection point, but after which we don’t see the outcome. The scenes depicted in the paintings can often be interpreted as moments before a significant event, perhaps a change of fate or an instance of its realization. In these paintings, the fluidity and uncertainty of Wateridge’s subjects imbue them with a sense of existential unease. Any certainty they might have had before now seems to be gone.
