2023, Oil on canvas, 180 x 150cm
The original painting is sold, private collection - Enquire.
Under rays of heavenly light, a father and son stand before an impossible wall of water. The wave is not arriving from some distant horizon. It begins its approach the moment a human being is born.
Time gathers behind us like an ocean standing vertically, immense and patient. Childhood, memory, fear and love exist for a moment beneath its shadow. The father has already travelled further into the storm; the child has only just entered it. Above them, light breaks through the clouds with the strange authority of a religious apparition, offering neither rescue nor explanation.
In A NEW FAITH, Joel Rea turns the familiar language of the sublime into a psychological landscape, where the ocean becomes time itself: beautiful, terrifying and inevitable. The figures do not flee. They stand before the impossible as though witnessing the future arrive.
Watch the animation here.