The Rest for the Godless

Rings of pale white bloom across a dark blue-grey field, some perfect circles, some blurred into cloudy patches, scattered with tiny dots that could be air bubbles trapped under ice. The whole surface behaves like frost spreading over a puddle overnight, or a slide of something viewed under a microscope, or a dense patch of stars. Adrian Sibley gives no horizon, no figure, no clear top or bottom. The paint spreads edge to edge with equal weight everywhere, a technique painters call all-over composition, which came out of mid twentieth century abstraction and was meant to stop your eye from settling in one comfortable spot.

The title plays with an old saying. "No rest for the wicked" comes from the Book of Isaiah and usually gets muttered by someone facing a long shift. Sibley turns it around and offers the godless a rest after all, though what he offers looks less like a soft bed and more like a frozen expanse. Whether that reads as peace or as a cold void probably depends on the mood you bring to it. Worth noticing are the darker holes near the lower centre, where the white crust thins out and something deeper shows through, small gaps that keep the surface from feeling entirely solid.