Wathen paints haunting portraits of children, adults and animals against uniform, chiaroscuro backgrounds or idealised natural settings. Initially straightforward, Wathen uses the familiarity of subjects, techniques and compositions in old paintings to comfort the viewer with recognition. Yet on closer examination certain distortions or incongruous details reveal the image to be more complex. Amalgamations of fragments seamlessly collaged from a variety of sources, each portrait becomes a composite of Wathen’s imagination, a considered representation of his subconscious.

His series of portraits of children holding their pet animals – rabbits, a kestrel, a butterfly – are each given a name rather than a title. The relationship between child and animal – how they hold it, how they resemble it – becomes as much an indication of who they are as their countenance or the details of their attire. Other works of children and adults resemble the formal compositions of traditional painting and early photography. More recently Wathen has begun a series of landscapes, pregnant with a plethora of immediately visible and more inconspicuous creatures. Deer, partridges, ladybirds, ants - each as attentively rendered as his human subjects.

It is difficult to tell exactly how old his characters are or to which time they belong. Wathen refrains from any certainty through a peculiar combination of conflicting features. Children have grey hair or receding hairlines or wear adult’s clothes; older subjects retain youthful bodies. His resistance to determining their age means some of the portraits hold the narrative of an entire life. This ambiguity extends into his choice of costume and embellishment. Extracted from a variety of periods, these details are blended together in such a way that one can ultimately only locate his paintings as contemporary.

Wathen’s source material includes Illustrated encyclopaedias on nature from the 70s that categorise animals and habitats; turn of the century photographic catalogues showing the people and fashions of an age; and classic children’s storybooks from his childhood. He also retrieves details from an eclectic mix of paintings and painters, such as Fragonard and Edward Hicks. The title of the show references a body of works called Peaceable Kingdom by Hicks. A 19th century naïve painter and Quaker minister from Pennsylvania, he painted over a hundred versions of the same image inspired by the message of peace between animals and humans in Chapter 11 of Isaiah.

Portraiture allows us to encounter people that are not here or are not real. Displaced from that subject, empathy in normal terms is impossible but the desire to engage remains. Portraits also allow their subjects to gaze out from their illusionistic world at us in our real one. Yet what’s to say that’s it’s not the other way round; that their constructed world is just as authentic as ours. That we also seem to them composites of borrowed identities in conflated times.

Unpeaceable Kingdom is Wathen’s first solo show. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions in 2004 include: Year Zero `Vanitas`, The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland in Sept; She’s come undone, curated by Augusto Arbizo at Artimis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York in June; Britannia Works, curated by Katerina Gregos, the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Centre and Renos Xippas Gallery, Athens in April-May; and I, Assassin, curated by Slater Bradley at Wallspace gallery, New York in February.