James White, H.P. 12 – detail, 2024
James White
House Plants (H.P.) ⎯ Indoor Nature (I.N.)
September 22 – October 25, 2025
September 22 – October 25, 2025
James White (b. 1967, Devon, UK) has long explored the potential of painting to render the everyday both familiar and strange. His practice stands at a crossroads in British art: indebted to the legacy of Pop and photorealism, yet equally insistent on the painterly as the true centre of his work. Photography serves as the initial source, but White’s translations into paint deliberately resist straightforward documentation. Instead, they complicate perception, intensifying the seemingly trivial while denying the viewer the ease of a complete reading.
The current presentation, which coincides with the gallery’s Online Viewing Room, brings together five recent works from the House Plants series and one framed work on paper from Indoor Nature. At first glance these modest domestic scenes — potted plants, tables, interiors — appear disarmingly simple. Yet White insists that the very banality of such subjects holds significance.
The current presentation, which coincides with the gallery’s Online Viewing Room, brings together five recent works from the House Plants series and one framed work on paper from Indoor Nature. At first glance these modest domestic scenes — potted plants, tables, interiors — appear disarmingly simple. Yet White insists that the very banality of such subjects holds significance.
This heightened awareness of the ordinary situates James White within the long history of still life, where everyday objects become carriers of cultural meaning. Yet unlike classical still life, which frequently invited symbolic interpretation, White frustrates narrative clarity. His scenes seem legible at first glance, but closer inspection reveals disruptions: cropped or fragmented compositions, reflective barriers, and subtle obstructions that generate what might be termed a “viewing disorder.” The spectator is drawn into the work, yet left uncertain of its full legibility.
Installation views, I’ll see you when I see you, Fondation Fernet Branca, France, 2022
James White, H.P. 1 – detail, 2024
Materiality plays a crucial role in this destabilisation. White chooses supports not of canvas or linen, but aluminium plates, honeycomb board, or plywood. For the House Plants (H.P.) series, aluminium provides a perfectly flat, stable surface that allows for luminous detail while echoing the cool detachment of photographic imagery. Each painting is then encased in a Perspex box, which functions not merely as protection but as a reflective device. Like a shop window, the Perspex both reveals and conceals, presenting the work as an object of display while also folding the viewer’s own reflection into the image. This reflective encounter is central to the artist’s practice: it turns the act of looking into a negotiation between interior and exterior, subject and spectator. Installed in the gallery, this effect becomes unavoidable; online, it disappears entirely, underscoring the necessity of direct, physical encounter.
“With these new paintings I was interested in the idea of the houseplant as the perfect metaphor for observation, or even complicity. In the context of the home, they function as more than ornament — they are silent witnesses to the unfolding narratives of our lives. Their slow, imperceptible growth contrasts with the swift, volatile rhythms of human activity: arguments, laughter, solitude, and intimacy play out around them. They shape and frame our spaces while simultaneously reflecting back our need for care, attention, and continuity.“
⎯ James White
Installation view, Not this time, Galerie Greta Meert, 2021
The black-and-white palette furthers this dynamic. On one hand, it places White in dialogue with the visual language of photography, evoking documentary truth. On the other, it imposes distance: colour is withheld, reality appears estranged, and the reflective, psychological dimension of the work is heightened. What begins as a transcription of the real becomes something more elusive — an image that refracts, rather than confirms, experience.
Installation views, OVR James White, Galerie Greta Meert, 2025
Taken together, these works reveal James White’s sustained inquiry into how the most unassuming details of domestic life can open onto broader questions of perception, culture, and meaning. By placing the spectator in a space of reflection, literal and metaphorical, he shows that the banal is never neutral. With Indoor Nature and House Plants, the everyday emerges as a stage where intimacy, fragility, and the complexities of observation unfold, leaving the viewer suspended between recognition and uncertainty, between presence and estrangement.
Installation views, OVR James White, Galerie Greta Meert, 2025
James White, Indoor Nature, 2024, softcover publication
Published by James White in 2024 in a limited edition of 75 copies, this modest yet beautifully printed booklet focuses on I.N. (Indoor Nature) while also providing a visual insight into the House Plants works. Rather than functioning solely as documentation, the publication develops into a refined graphic analysis. Through its sequencing, the pages form a single, continuous composition that extends beyond illustration, allowing the booklet to be perceived as a coherent and autonomous work in itself.
Portrait James White in the studio. Photo by Peter Mallett.