John Noestheden’s more than 40-year career has encompassed work across many media, from his celebrated ‘Diamond Drawings’, through painting, sculpture, and multimedia outdoor installations. Common to much of this rich and diverse practice has been the impulse to “look up”: whether commissioning a skywriter to create a four-mile wide ‘smoke ring’ over downtown Toronto, or through his inventive and eclectic works on paper that ceaselessly explore new ways to represent the awe and wonder of humankind’s relationship to the cosmos.

The selection of work in John Noestheden: Absence & Presence represents the diversity of approaches within the artist’s oeuvre, here linked by the use of the color black. For Noestheden, black represents both the infinity of deep space, as well as the plenitude of the visual: black as the absorption of all of the visible wavelengths of light, and thus the container of all colors.

Diamond Drawings are represented by Double Cluster, Blackfield 5, and Hamilton Field, three works whose formations of Swarovski diamond crystals are laid out across black backgrounds. Noestheden has here used mineral elements suspended in archival glue as a means to create the infinite dark space of his work’s grounds. As with his Mirror, Tispace, and Portrait works, the velvety texture of these blacks absorbs light, while minute reflections bounce off the carborundum and titanium ore elements as we move around the works, creating further analogues for the flickering light of distant stars as seen through the vacuum of space.

Noestheden’s keen sensibility for the material qualities of his medium stems from an understanding of its ability to carry both metaphorical and representational meanings. Carborundum, for example, is a compound mineral found only rarely in the natural world—usually in meteorites that have traveled millions of miles through space to reach earth. The artist’s large-scale Sterrenstof diptych is composed of stardust, ash, and clay, suspended in oil, and acrylic mediums applied to canvas.

The latter work was shown in 2021 in an installation at the McMaster Museum, Hamilton, Ontario, alongside Burnham Volume 1, an acrylic and stardust on canvas piece that represents a further dimension of the artist’s practice. The Burnham works, as well as Imaging 2 and 12, Collision Section One, and Einstein’s Cross Variations, are each based on representations of the universe as recorded in the works of historical and current astronomers and scientists. Noestheden layers, crops, multiplies and enlarges these source materials in a way that foregrounds the search for meaning over literal representation. As the artist has written:

“My process is guided by an accumulating interest in the sciences — not to duplicate science, nor to make art out of science. There is a cosmological analogy that appears through the humanities, the contemplative, and within this body of work: looking without needing an answer.”