The White Visitation

2013–2016

A grid-based series in a fixed canvas size, exploring power, colonialism, and history by way of Gravity’s Rainbow.

The White Visitation takes its title from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, drawing on the novel's imagery of colonialism, violence, and apocalypse. The title refers to the arrival of the colonizers as an ominous event: when "the whites" arrive, the existing world is transformed through violence and destruction. It evokes the brutal history of European colonialism in Africa, including the atrocities committed in the Congo under German and other European colonial forces.

The title is intentionally historical and literary rather than descriptive of the appearance of the paintings themselves. It provides a point of departure for a body of work concerned with power, destruction, history, and the consequences of imposing one worldview upon another.

Formally, the series was an exercise in restriction. Scarzafava worked within a fixed canvas size and presented the paintings together in a grid. By establishing the same physical parameters for each work, he removed scale and format as variables and instead focused on what could happen within those boundaries.

The grid gives the individual paintings a collective presence. Each work functions independently while becoming part of a larger visual field, allowing differences in gesture, color, texture, and composition to emerge through repetition.

The White Visitation is therefore both a conceptual and formal experiment: a series grounded in a disturbing historical and literary reference, constructed through deliberate limitations of scale and presentation.