John Wyatt Clarke’s paintings derive from scientific diagrams. They explore the role of visual languages in our attempts to understand the forces that act upon us all as we move through the world. They are Romantic paintings of concrete data. Diagrams stripped of their explanatory text become almost meaningless: the paint must provide the meaning, not-knowing must replace needing-to-know. The clash of registers and intentions between diagram and painting embodies the strains between contrasting modes of understanding, as well as the pressures that we live and act under. We are swept along by time, held down by gravity, spun through night and day; much of what we do is beyond our control, we must breathe, eat, drink, sleep, we do not choose what we will dream. For years John’s paintings followed quite directly from their sources, but recently they began to ask the question ‘what do these diagrams want?’ His answer is that they want to be taken into the perfect but uncanny world that they are trying to wordlessly conjure for us. These paintings are his offerings back to the diagrams, visions of the worlds they want to be in, of perfected scientific reality based in myth: Paradise Regained.