Perrotin is pleased to debut Vapors, an exhibition of paintings by British-American artist Emma
Webster, marking her first show in Hong Kong. It opens Tuesday, March 25, 2025. The 11
canvases, painted during the Los Angeles fires this January, show ethereal, empty landscapes
imbued with an unsettling, atmospheric calm. Some paintings suggest the arrival of
unfathomable calamity, while others impart the cool surrender of catastrophic aftermath. In
these works, Webster invents a wholly new genre of painting that blurs the boundaries
between plein-air landscape, still-life, and virtual reality.

Last year, California—where the artist currently works and resides—witnessed a record-
breaking dry season, which ultimately triggered the recent wildfire in LA, wiping out entire
ecosystems and neighborhoods. The world watched online as Pacific Palisades, the
neighborhood where Webster’s maternal family is from, burned to the ground. Despite the
urgency to reverse climate change, efforts remain focused on mitigating symptoms instead of
resolving the causes. This tragic complacency and surrender to illusion seeps into Vapors.

For Webster, the state of the climate is existential. Working during the devastating wildfires
near her studio, she was reminded of the nightmarish global pandemic—wearing masks, doom-
scrolling the news, air purifiers, learning of losses from friends and family. All of it exacerbated
by an antithetical bewilderment: What can be done? Reflecting on the experience, Webster
describes the uncomfortable banality of daily life, stalled and suspended, despite the terrible
and profound disaster outside. This sense of lost gravity is apparent in every painting.

Vapor, a natural ghostly phenomenon of suspended liquid in air, is often a fleeting result of
change: temperature, atmospheric, weather, environmental. Moreover, vapor is barely
perceptible to the human eye and is most often associated with breath. It is the moment when
our inner and outer worlds collide. “To have the vapors” connotes melancholic humor – it was a
term if one was depressed or emotionally “under the weather.” Vapor’s ethereal, transient, and
transformative qualities, both in nature and metaphorical dimensions, ring in the paintings’
misty greys and thin glazed brushstrokes.

Much like the lineage of landscape painting itself, Emma Webster does not reproduce vistas
from real life, but cobbles together worlds to paint from. Landscape in the sixteenth century
was first conceived as background, and then came to signify scenery. Depictions of nature were
conceived from a purely human vantage point as a stage set for human actions, perceptions,
and material exploitations. As the industrial revolution inspired a pastoral exodus, man set to
carving the landscape to suit his whims. Human agency transformed nature in ways that would
come to threaten it; the effects of which we are forced to contend with now.

Webster first adopted sculpture studies as means of creating spatial realism in her paintings.
This germination began when she briefly worked in set design before furthering her studies at
Yale Graduate School. Her hybrid creative process involves making sculptures both in and
outside of the computer. She crafts objects with wax and plaster, then 3D-scans them, and
integrates them into her digital dioramas. Using the computer, she combines VR elements with
sophisticated light rendering, which she then projects and paints onto canvas. Webster’s
workflow is porous. As these virtual and physical worlds change hands, boundaries are
reimagined, and spectators are encouraged to question what is real and what is fantasy.

Using digital prosthetics such as the Oculus and Blender, Webster is among the first artists of
her generation to repurpose these tools for painting. From orchestrating gestural sweeps to
painstakingly fine-tuning minute details, her pictures lull the spectator with their
phantasmagoric and painterly delight.

In these paintings of no man’s land, birds– whose instinct is to fly– are portrayed in static
postures, implying their unnatural, even dire circumstances. In Alaska, a calcified vulture is
perched and stiff; the Sparrow is pinned in mid-air; Odette, an abstracted swan, part-drawing
part-frame sits under a dolmen; even the bulky Black Bird with a Mooresque musculature is
weighted, planted in a desolate vista. What these paintings have in common is also the
dominating physical presence of the singular animal, occupying a large portion of the image,
bringing to mind portraiture in the Romantic era. Meanwhile, their mythical personas are
suggested by the visual features of taffy surfaces and the eerie dimensionality of 3D rendering.

Unlike most of Webster's terrains and vegetation, which are “grown” digitally using the Oculus,
the shrubs in Brushwood are adapted from 3D scans of a bonsai tree. Already an artificial form
of nature that has been manipulated and controlled, the bonsai scan amplifies its digital
glitches, further heightening its falsities. Additionally, its scale inversion transforms it from
miniature to giant. The tree is illuminated by a dramatic radiance, similar to the golden beams
around the sacrificial lamb in Jan van Eyck's Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Its swept, tendril
branches sway in invisible tumult. The winds of change are not always placid.

Evolving from the sci-fi terrains of Illuminarium, her first show with Perrotin, Webster here opts
for stark, refined compositions, where vastness is hard not to conflate with loneliness.
Woodside, named after the street of her childhood home, also literally means the wood left on
the side. In both interpretations, the forest is “placed.” The sun is painted between the trees
and their shadows, using techniques similar to sfumato, pioneered by greats such as Claude
Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin. Contradicting light sources create unusual, improbable scenes
where the long-cast shadows are oddly illuminated.

The Means that Make, portraying a solemn clover with an expansive sail above, introduces a
new spiritual discourse in her work. Like the visionary spiritualist-painters William Blake,
Frederic Church, and Agnes Pelton, Webster uses light to speak to the spirit. The luminous crack
of the horizon resembles a seam splitting open into the beyond. Within it, we find an
omnipresent breath, equal parts invocation and revelation.

Emma Webster’s practice mirrors the soul-searching of our zeitgeist, in which we must contend
with both our environmental impact and AI sentience. The ground shifts beneath us; the bonsai
becomes behemoth; the mountain, molehill. The winds change course. We inhale, we exhale.
We call out, and the vapor of our breath is our only trace.