The internet’s grip on reality is both fascinating and loathsome. The images used in Paul Wallington’s paintings come from the busy visual world he inhabits, reflecting playfulness, cynicism and pleasure while also referencing the tragedy, struggle and hope, found so prominent in Wallington’s home country of South Africa.

These stories are easily communicated through the phenomenon of “doomscrolling”, which explores how browsing the internet and extensively consuming media creates self-perpetuating cycles of negativity which translate into our lived reality.

George Gerbner, a professor of communication who came up with the idea, calls it “mean world syndrome”, a term perfectly fit to explain much of the current online – and real world – anxiety in our societies. This can also be attributed to the rise in conspiracy theories as people try to make sense out of an avalanche of information and disinformation as well as a distrust in the news and mainstream media.

Paul Wallington’s works challenge the idea of “doomscrolling” by sourcing images from the internet and his personal life and translating them into oil paintings. The painting technique has the appearance of a broken or glitched image, caused by the under-painting showing through while the overpainting appears to be unraveling, either from the drips from the oil medium or places he simply decided to leave not painted over, creating a crack on the surface.

Rather than showing only horrific images which perpetuate the distress seen online, these works also show humans as consumers, wrapped up in a cycle of observing media. Painted figures staring at something outside the frame which we, as the audience, cannot see, be it a movie screen, an eclipse or a car accident. The use of self-portraits emphasizes and inserts the artist into that same cycle and helps break the imagery sourced from online, adding a self- awareness and humor to the work.

Don Delillo’s book Zero K (2016) has greatly influenced this idea. Most notably, the descriptions of a protagonist wandering the hall of an immortality clinic while screens play out scenes from the world. Sometimes tranquil, like rain on water or images of the sky, and other times scenes of extreme violence such as the Tibetan monk who burned himself when protesting the Vietnam war.

The combination of the mundane, the beautiful and the horrific, executed through a recognizable format creates a fractured story that attempts to communicate this phenomenon because unlike our phones, these works create a conversation with one another on a wall and are not hidden above or below the “online feed”.