In this painting, the artist creates a landscape that explores the nature of perception, the codes that permeate our world, and what it means to be real and alive if we—and everything around us—are code, too. Here, the artist’s deep green background color is overlaid with hard-edged forms based on satellite map imagery.

In this series of “Terrain” paintings, the question of whether there is any fundamental difference between the natural world and the artificial one takes center stage. As terraformed images made from torn apart and recomposed fragments from the artist's landscape studies, these highly-abstracted landscape paintings become reminiscent of the cubist notion of simultaneity, medieval European painting before the advent of perspective, and the multi-perspectival paintings of traditional Indian and Chinese landscapes.

Christopher Astley’s art practice has always centered on questions concerning the underlying nature of reality. The relationship of time and space and, more recently, the codes that pervade and describe the universe have propelled his work into strange new territories.