The Brooklyn Rail

Can a painting simultaneously focus on political satire while experimenting with modes of abstraction? The two central paintings in Mark Thomas Gibson’s The Voyage are a new development in the artist’s oeuvre and employ texture and pattern as a disruptor. In Returns on a Homeward Tide and The Shipwreck (both 2025), the symbolism is straightforward: the ship of state can either persist or sink. Gibson builds his statement around the physical object of the ship—a wooden vessel composed of parti-colored planks, rendered by rubbing the canvas over pieces of wood, producing a convincing rendition of the grain, but a very schematic ship. The planks are assembled orthogonally, and the artist applies details through which he lays out his visual argument using the order and disorder of this patterned geometry as the primary structure for his discourse. In Returns on a Homeward Tide, an intact ship, flying the American flag, seems to be treading water; the anchor is aloft and criss-crossing, and absurdly narrow oars seem to be trying to move the ship, but they are at cross purposes. We are mesmerized by the flickering planks moving horizontally across the canvas. In The Shipwreck, the ship angles out of the water, pivoting around the vessel’s wheel, the curve of the detached keel emphasizing the jarring movement downward; meanwhile, the ship’s rudder hangs useless. The mosaic of wood grains is now at a steep angle, and, on the right side, some of the lovely planks have splintered, as well as the mast. A blindingly white cloth is draped limply over the top half of the fallen mast—a flag of surrender. In both paintings, a single eye glares out at us from the depths of the ship, either the perpetrator or the victim. The artist’s clear joy at playing with the textures hasn’t clouded the message of the works, and—as is always the case with Gibson’s paintings—he cheerfully lulls us into a comedic mood in order to administer strong medicine.

The other smaller paintings in The Voyage not only utilize pattern as a momentary break from figuration, but also rely on the classic comic book symbolism of disembodied hands and legs to indicate action and consequent chaos. In Crew of Saboteurs (2026), one hand stabs an inflatable raft with a blade, while another uses a knife to cut a rope that appears to be holding the raft in place. The arm attached to the latter hand is covered in pinstripes, the lines of the suit vibrating and humming with a pulsating energy, forming an abstract L-shape. The energy of this form adds to the competing movements in the painting—the choppy water, the cloud of air escaping from the deflating raft. Gibson is pushing the various actors in his painting away from the reliability of his previous comic-based visual vernacular into a Duchampian game of interacting objects. In Crossing the Divide (2025), he gleefully adds in chicken feathers, a mirror, and a streetlamp—in addition to his politicking hands‚using the framework of political corruption and climate disaster as a means of corralling random objects into a single panel. In The Bounty (2025), the tone is more surreal—the orange raft now bobs up and down in the waves filled to the brim with bunches of mangoes hanging from the branch, lemon and orange trees, watermelons, strawberries, and a variety of flora, while a crow and a pigeon nestle among the vegetation. Here Gibson seeks to overwhelm our senses, not with heightened patterns, but instead with excess in the style of Henri Rousseau’s lush jungles. But is all this disorientation in the service of the political, or the painterly?

A pair of works from 2026, Capricorn (the sea-goat) and Town Crier: The Voyage, only seek to complicate Gibson’s strategy. The Town Crier figure, Gibson’s cartoon alter-ego, courageously calls out the crimes and failings of the ruling class. Through a six-panel cartoon broadside, the Town Crier crystallizes the metaphor of the foundering ship as our current situation. Capricorn, on the other hand, is a rough two-panel depiction of the constellation under which the artist was born, as well as the date of the exhibition’s opening. One panel depicts the constellation in black on white; the other is the inverse, the work acting somewhat as a self-portrait, but substituting a mystical pattern as a stand-in for Gibson himself. In The Voyage, the two approaches gel, but still maintain a tentative distance: the artist has set himself a very difficult aesthetic and philosophical project with which to play. On some level, the sheer absurdity and surreality of the times may continue to force his pen deeper into this hybrid style.