Presented as triptychs Version III The Black Paintings (fear of black consciousness) originated during extended summer visits between Forbes and his grandchildren in 2025. Wishing to move beyond literal, childlike figuration, houses, figures, and domestic scenes rendered in familiar terms, Forbes introduced the children to drip painting and to the direct extrusion of paint from the bottle. While guiding these informal lessons, he concurrently commenced his own series of paintings, adopting impulsive gestures intentionally directed toward an exploration of abstraction and narrative expansion. The presence of his grandchildren brought a spirit of playfulness, yet beneath the surface lay a sharper critical impulse: the desire to situate painting within a broader conceptual and political framework.

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The series investigates what Forbes terms landscapes of darkness: pictorial fields where material process, racialised histories, and the affective economies of fear converge. The historical association of darkness and blackness with danger, deficiency, or otherness is deeply embedded within colonial and postcolonial discourses. In British imperial rhetoric, metaphors of light and civilisation were repeatedly mobilised to justify territorial expansion and cultural domination. Africa in particular was cast as a ‘dark continent,’ simultaneously feared, exoticised, and claimed for economic extraction. These discourses not only shaped colonial conquest but also endure in the present, surfacing in media representation, nationalist rhetoric, and the politics of migration. This longer history provides the conceptual scaffolding for Forbes’ inquiry and informs his decision to place abstraction at the centre of the work, that also encompasses the influence of landscape from his photographic project, such as Dirty Little Secret  If Blackness Was a Landscape  What Would You See?

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Although the works originate from playful, intergenerational exchange, each painting is intended to be legible on its own terms while also capable of entering productive dialogues with sculpture and photography in Forbes’ wider practice. The apparent lightness of the surfaces, which derives from improvisation and the energy of working alongside children, coexists with a vigilant awareness of racialised precarity. Forbes describes a constant but variable ‘racialisation antenna’ that registers social forces seeking to undermine his existence as a black man; this vigilance informs both formal and conceptual decisions without overwhelming the imperative to experiment and play.

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Crucially, these works cannot be disentangled from the wider political climate of the summer of 2025. Across the UK, Europe, Ukraine, and the United States, right-wing populist movements are intensifying their grip on political discourse, invoking protection of land and borders as central rallying cries. Policies of exclusion are justified through narratives of entitlement and greed: the notion that certain territories, resources, and cultural spaces ‘belong’ to specific groups, while others are framed as perpetual outsiders. Brexit’s lingering rhetoric of sovereignty, European anxieties over migration across the Mediterranean, and American debates on the southern border all coalesce into a politics of fear and possession. In Ukraine, the brutal war has become a violent manifestation of territorial greed and entitlement, with Russia’s expansionist logic underscoring how control of land is weaponised.

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The unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza intensifies the concerns central to Version III The Black Paintings (fear of black consciousness), as competing claims to land, history, and sovereignty result in widespread devastation, displacement, and unprecedented loss of life. The situation in Israel and Palestine in 2025 starkly illustrates how territorial entitlement, legitimated through political, religious, and historical frameworks translates into profound human suffering. These global events resonate within Forbes’ landscapes of darkness, underscoring that these paintings cannot be separated from contemporary struggles over borders, belonging, and visibility. Just as colonial discourses historically mapped blackness as darkness, contemporary right-wing politics casts migrants, refugees, and racialised others as threats to national integrity, reinforcing the enduring entanglement of fear with territory.

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The initial paintings repurpose materials acquired for Forbes’ grandchildren: four A3 sheets taped together to form A1 paper, with the spiral-bound perforations intentionally retained as evidence of process. The paper’s hygroscopic response to paint produces puckering creating a textured, topographical surface that Forbes describes as echoing geographical contours. Subsequent large-scale works will be translated a onto stretched linen using acrylic or domestic paint, sustaining and expanding the abstract visual vocabulary at greater scale.

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Version III The Black Paintings (fear of black consciousness) integrates domestic pedagogy, material experimentation, historical critique, and political urgency. Abstraction functions as a method through which histories of blackness, colonial representation, and contemporary territorial politics can be examined and reimagined. The work asserts that art in 2025 cannot remain separate from right-wing narratives, expansionist wars, and humanitarian crises. Instead, it registers how the weight of history and the volatility of the present converge in painted form, offering both a warning and a possibility: that blackness, when rendered as landscape, reveals the interconnections of play, resistance, and the contested politics of land.

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As the work evolves, Forbes’ approach to presentation includes the triptych format, extending the narrative across three interconnected paintings and emphasising layers, depth, and relational dialogue between the panels. This aligns with a recurring theme in his practice: the impact of religion on constructions of whiteness and racialisation. The term ‘triptych’ derives from the Greek triptykhos, meaning ‘three-layered’ or ‘having three folds,’ reflecting the significance of layered structure in both form and concept. Triptychs became prominent in Christian art during the Middle Ages, often symbolically associated with the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In Forbes’ work, the three panels amplify the layered interrogation of blackness, visibility, and contested landscapes while situating the work firmly within the urgent political moment of 2025. The triptych mirrors the multiplicity of perspectives, histories, and stakes in global conflicts over land, borders, and entitlement, demonstrating how abstraction can engage with, reflect, and critique contemporary social and political turbulence.

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Through this integration of domestic play, material experimentation, historical consciousness, and political critique, Version III The Black Paintings (fear of black consciousness) develops a visual language capable of addressing both the intimate and the global, the personal and the geopolitical, producing a work conceptually layered, and deeply responsive to its time.