The Sublime & The Consumed

Artists

James Vaulkhard

Press release

Today (11 April) marks the opening of The Sublime & The Consumed a new solo exhibition from Kenyan-born artist James Vaulkhard at Blond Contemporary’s London gallery curated by MC Llamas. Back in 2024 Vaulkhard embarked on an American odyssey, traveling over 5,000 miles across the US, and into the American sublime. The results of this remarkable and poignant journey and his reflections on the American landscape today are presented for the first time this new solo exhibition. 

In October last year, Vaulkhard began his voyage, inspired by the ideas of the Hudson River School painters. This group of 19th-century artists and thinkers sought to evoke the majesty and spirituality of the natural world and to inspire profound admiration for its beauty, Vaulkhard witnessed a nation at a key moment in its history, faced with environmental reckoning and political uncertainty. 

While the Hudson River School painters saw an untouched wilderness before them, full of hope, promise and national pride, Vaulkhard depicts a more complex, troubled vision of the same landscape – shaped by ambition, greed, exploitation, and nationalistic nostalgia. The serene, sweeping vistas that once embodied boundless possibility now bear the marks of human intervention, reflecting the delicate balance between preservation and progress, reverence and consumption. 

Vaulkhard – known for his expressive use of colour – employs contrasts of light and dark symbolic forces in these intimately-scaled pastel works on wood panels. The golden, expansive hues of the sublime landscape, for example, contrast with the creeping, ominous shadows of human impact. Vibrant colour fields evoke a rapturous, almost mythic connection to nature, while deep tonal shifts and obscured details suggest an uneasy allure, as if the grandeur of the land is poised to reap revenge on humanity. With urgent, charged mark-making, Vaulkhard interrogates the aesthetics of the sublime in a time when the natural world is no longer a symbol of boundless potential, but a fragile, teetering monument to human intervention. 

Curator, MC Llamas said, “As the US is poised between past and future, The Sublime & The Consumed offers a meditation on the landscapes and how we alter them – perhaps irrevocably.” 

Gallery Founder, Phillip Blond said, “James Vaulkhard’s painting evinces the grandeurs of the American landscape echoing the depictions of the past. But in contrast to the black and white palette of say Ansel Adams, here the terrain is imbibed with intense colour and hue speaking of a vibrant world alive to our subjectivity but not consumed by it - seeking instead to turn us from malign introspection to engagement with the real itself.” 

Driven from a philosophical curatorial approach, Blond Contemporary focuses on a diverse programme through a political lens to recover the evocative transformative power of art and its potential in re-establishing human good. 
--
James Vaulkhard is a Kenyan-born, London-based visual artist. He holds a BA Degree in History of Art from Leeds University and has trained and taught at Charles Cecil Studios and Studio Della Statua, Florence. In 2013, he was commissioned to participate in a bridge project between Italy and Kenya, developing the preliminary studies for the Kericho Cathedral in collaboration with local Kenyan sculptors. A year later, he relocated to London. His present work revisits and refracts his roots in portraiture, often with a multi-media approach and elements of collage. He recently completed a family commissioned portrait of Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi. He is also known for his unofficial 2017 portrait of Donald Trump, created from cuttings of historical dictators and political tyrants. jamesvaulkhard.com 

Blond Contemporary specialises in Contemporary Art and Photography. The London-based gallery is both a secondary market specialist and a primary platform for emerging talent. Their focus is on the redolent, the innovative and the expressive in art – with a concern for colour, formalism and volume.

MC Llamas is a French, London-based independent curator. She is rapidly making a name for herself as a star curator of the next generation and prominent figure on the contemporary art scene. MC represents contemporary artists whose practices are born from a classical technique and education. She curates works of art which represent joyful human experiences of an ethereal beauty. GUERIN PROJECTS was created in 2022, its name is eponymous of MC’s late mother Hélène Guérin.