SALA Festival. PRAXIS Artspace. 15 Aug 2025
Multimedia artist Thom Buchanan has an abiding interest in urban environments and their impact in the world. He often produces paintings on a large scale and has completed many public murals on commission. Buchanan also creates temporary works in response to musical and dance performances — the visual artist as performer.
For his welcome exhibition, Fractal Paradigm at PRAXIS Artspace, he has created a series of easel paintings in which he continues to explore his unique and complex technique of overlaying imagery of city streetscapes and rural landscapes. By colliding and layering the imagery, he invites consideration of the nature and impact of urban development on the environment and how urban living affects and structures our lives and preoccupations.
Thom Buchanan, Edge of Renewal, 2025
acrylic on canvas 145 x 180 cm, photo courtesy of the artist
Buchanan says of his work:
“Fractal Paradigm examines the evolving tension between built environments and the natural world—interrogating the ways we inscribe ourselves onto the landscapes we inhabit, and how, in turn, those environments shape our perceptions, histories, and futures.”
Formally, Buchanan’s finely crafted work mixes painterliness with the pictorial resemblance of photography, and he carefully balances these elements to create an absorbing montage with a unique and compelling aesthetic. Edge of Renewal shows a cityscape with the sky above a map of the land, as if the city is slowly engulfing, or colonising, the territory. The silhouette of a torn flag suggests the deterioration of society, and implicitly, the city itself. Often with darkened skies and deep shadows, the imagery has a brooding, haunting character, with a hint of the Romantic sublime, as if the cityscape overwhelms the citizenry who created it.
The Clearing, shown at the top of the page, is perhaps the most eloquent example in showing a bush clearing in the city’s midst, with human figures straddling the two worlds. The depiction of these anonymous, ubiquitous cityscapes in a manner that starkly emphasises one-point perspective suggests both the corralling of human activity and the attempt to occupy and control the environment. Numerals appear in some of the works, perhaps referencing the subdivision of land into private holdings.
Thom Buchanan, Seed Bank, 2025
acrylic and oil on linen 60 x 45 cm, photo courtesy of the artist
Seed Bank, above, shows a building beneath a sunlit sky, perched way above a city street within a subterranean world, creating a potent juxtaposition between the insidiously invasive metropolis and the seed bank building whose purpose is to preserve nature. The building appears neglected, as if the future of life is also being neglected.
Blueprints for Tomorrow, below, shows fragments of pixelation and vehicles of the 1960s to invite reflection on how yesterday’s predictions for the future have turned out, drawing on our memories and suggesting how memory colours our perceptions of the present and desires for the future. Buchanan’s paintings raise the issue of the way in which architectural space is defined and used. His title for the exhibition, Fractal Paradigm, is perhaps a metaphor for our labyrinthine urban environments.
Thom Buchanan, Blueprints of Tomorrow, 2025
acrylic and oil on canvas 1100 x 940 cm, photo courtesy of the artist
As the imagery hovers between abstraction and representation, the viewer’s attention shifts from the carefully wrought materiality of the work, which is sometimes characterised by a heavy impasto and sometimes thin washes of paint, to the imagery. The layering of paint can suggest the erasure of the landscape and the superimposition of the city. Viewers’ attention also shifts from the implied photographic record to speculative, imaginative pondering, creating an effect of unsettledness and dissociation.
Buchanan’s paintings can even suggest dreamscapes, in which individuals drift in a nether world of unreality. Unable to navigate or anchor themselves, they seem self-absorbed and unapproachable. These works recall French philosopher and critic Guy Debord’s concept of psychogeography, "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals," which raises concerns similar to those of Buchanan: the way in which urban topography and architecture confine and shape human activity. Viewing these paintings, one might imagine the feelings elicited by the competing environments.
Buchanan’s powerful exhibition Fractal Paradigm urges a reconsideration of the way in which we colonise and occupy the environment, how we value it and how we might collectively plan for the future.
Chris Reid
When: 24 Jul to 16 Aug 2025
Where: PRAXIS Artspace
More Info: https://www.praxisartspace.com/exhibitions/thom-buchanan/
Thom Buchanan, The Clearing, 2025
acrylic on canvas 145 x 180 cm
photo courtesy of the artist
