In a world crowded with images, contemporary art can still slow us down and ask us to understand one another. This is not because every artwork delivers a clear moral lesson, nor because looking at art automatically makes a person more compassionate. The encounter is subtler than that. A compelling work interrupts habitual seeing. It makes another life, another place or another way of sensing the world present long enough for us to remain with it.
Empathy in contemporary visual culture therefore begins with attention. It asks the viewer to resist the speed with which images are usually consumed, classified and forgotten. A painting, sculpture or textile work can hold ambiguity without resolving it into a headline. It can make room for dignity, vulnerability, memory and difference while allowing the subject to remain more complex than any single explanation.
At Gallery Les Bois, this possibility is visible across distinct practices. Annam Butt approaches portraiture through disciplined observation and material restraint. Volcan, the collaborative identity of Rex and Edna, uses portraiture and symbolism to consider identity, displacement and shared human experience. Caitlin Heffernan extends the idea of relationship beyond the human, creating paintings in which people, landscape and ecological systems are understood as interconnected. Their work suggests that empathy is not a theme applied to art from outside. It can be built into how an artist looks, makes and invites us to look in return.
EMPATHY BEGINS WITH SUSTAINED ATTENTION
Much of contemporary visual culture is designed to be understood immediately. Images compete for recognition, response and circulation; their success is often measured in seconds. Art can operate differently. It may withhold certainty, reward repetition and require the viewer to adjust their expectations. This change of pace matters because empathy rarely begins with instant comprehension. It begins with the willingness to stay.
Sustained looking allows small decisions to acquire significance: a posture, the pressure of a brushmark, the distance between figures, a passage of colour that feels guarded or exposed. None of these elements needs to dictate an emotional conclusion. Their power lies in creating conditions in which the viewer becomes attentive to another presence without assuming complete access to it.
This is an important distinction. Empathy is sometimes confused with identification, as though we can understand another person only by finding ourselves reflected in them. Art can offer a more generous encounter. It can allow difference to remain difference. The viewer may recognise an emotion or situation while also accepting that the life represented is not theirs to possess.
PORTRAITURE WITHOUT POSSESSION
Portraiture carries a particular responsibility because it places one person before the gaze of another. The strongest portraits do more than record appearance. They hold the tension between revelation and privacy, giving the sitter presence without pretending that a painted image can disclose everything about them.
In Jose (2025), Annam Butt uses close observation, restrained colour and carefully judged handling to create a figure who feels physically present yet psychologically independent. The seated posture, folded arms and directness of the face invite attention, but they do not collapse the sitter into a single mood. The painting gives the viewer time to notice while preserving the subject’s interior life.
This quality is inseparable from Butt’s process. Her figurative paintings combine traditional oil-painting methods, natural preparations and disciplined observation. She prepares surfaces with traditional grounds and natural glues, avoiding acrylic gesso and acrylic paint, and avoids solvents wherever possible. The measured pace of making supports the measured character of the encounter. Care exists both in the material construction of the painting and in the way the sitter is seen.
DIGNITY BEYOND A SINGLE STORY
Visual culture often reduces people to categories. News imagery and public debate may compress a life into a role, a crisis or a statistic. Art cannot repair that simplification by itself, but it can resist it. A portrait can restore duration and specificity, asking the viewer to meet an individual rather than consume an example.
This resistance is central to Volcan’s portraits of refugees. The works centre individuality and dignity, refusing to define a person solely by circumstance. The duo’s wider practice draws on symbolism, urban visual language and two perspectives brought into one shared artistic identity. Questions of movement, belonging, memory and connection are opened rather than settled.
That openness is crucial. Work concerned with displacement can easily become illustrative or prescriptive, telling the viewer what to think before a genuine encounter has occurred. Volcan’s paintings use colour, beauty and compositional intelligence to draw the viewer close, then allow meaning to unfold through reflection. Empathy is created not through simplification, but through an acknowledgement that another person’s experience exceeds the frame.
THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN FIELD OF CARE
Empathy is most commonly discussed as a relationship between people, yet contemporary art increasingly questions whether care should stop at the human boundary. Ecological understanding depends upon recognising relationships among species, materials, land, water and atmosphere. Art can make those relationships felt without turning them into a diagram or an instruction.
Caitlin Heffernan’s paintings approach nature as a living network rather than a distant view. Roots, rivers, geological processes, birds and atmospheric forces become interconnected presences. Oil, charcoal, pigment and natural elements including sand build surfaces in which forms emerge, dissolve and reconnect. The viewer moves between recognition and uncertainty, observation and felt experience.
Heffernan’s work does not ask us to imagine that a river, fungal network or landscape feels as a person does. Instead, it challenges the assumption that human experience exists separately from ecological systems. This expanded field of attention can support responsibility through connection. It gives sensorial form to the understanding that care for the living world is also care for the conditions of human life.
Readers interested in this relationship can continue with Can Art Change the Way We Think About the Environment?, which considers how art can shape environmental awareness without substituting for science or policy.
MATERIALS CAN CARRY AN ETHIC OF ATTENTION
An artwork’s empathetic force does not reside only in its subject. It can also be carried by the way the work is made. Patient preparation, sensitivity to materials and an awareness of origin or consequence give physical form to attention. These choices are not automatically virtuous, and no material can guarantee meaning. Their value depends upon how coherently they serve the work.
Butt’s traditional grounds, Heffernan’s materially responsive surfaces and Volcan’s use of selected road-found elements within the Roadworks series each establish a relationship between process and idea. The approaches are different and should not be flattened into one model. What connects them is the refusal to treat making as a neutral route to an image. Material decisions become part of how the artwork understands presence, place and responsibility.
This can be especially meaningful to collectors. To live with an artwork is to encounter its material intelligence repeatedly: the way a surface receives light, the evidence of the hand, the tension between delicacy and durability. Such qualities deepen appreciation because the work continues to disclose the thought embedded in its construction.
BEAUTY IS NOT THE OPPOSITE OF ETHICAL SERIOUSNESS
Art concerned with empathy is sometimes expected to announce its seriousness through discomfort alone. Yet beauty can be an important means of attention. Colour, rhythm, atmosphere and compositional assurance draw viewers into sustained engagement. They can create the openness required for a difficult or unfamiliar subject to be approached without reducing the work to a message.
This does not mean that beauty softens every subject or resolves every tension. It means that aesthetic strength and ethical intelligence need not be opposed. At Gallery Les Bois, sustainability and social awareness sit alongside artistic merit. A work must succeed as art: visually compelling, conceptually rigorous, properly made and, where relevant, potentially investment-worthy. Empathy has lasting value when it is carried by a work capable of sustaining attention beyond the urgency of its immediate context.
The same principle is explored in Sustainable Art: Beyond Materials, Towards a More Thoughtful Future. Responsibility is not a substitute for quality; it becomes most persuasive when embedded within the complete artistic achievement.
WHAT COLLECTORS CAN EXPERIENCE OVER TIME
A collector’s relationship with an artwork develops differently from a brief public encounter. Repeated viewing can loosen an initial interpretation. Details overlooked at first become central; an expression feels altered by changing light; a familiar composition begins to reveal its internal tensions. This duration is one reason art can support empathy more deeply than fast-moving imagery.
When considering a work, collectors might ask whether it leaves room for thought or exhausts itself in a single statement. Does its treatment of a person, place or ecological subject feel attentive rather than instrumental? Do its formal qualities reward proximity and distance? Does the work retain complexity while remaining emotionally available? These questions are not a scoring system. They are ways of noticing how an artwork may continue to live within a collection.
The experience is also personal. A painting may connect with memory, alter the atmosphere of a room or prompt conversations that could not have been planned at acquisition. The best work does not prescribe those responses. It creates a durable space in which they can occur.
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF VISUAL STORYTELLING
Artists who engage with identity, displacement, ecology or another person’s image carry responsibilities of framing. Whose experience is being represented? How much context is offered? Does the work preserve agency, or use a subject merely to intensify the artist’s claim? There are no universal answers, but serious practice remains alert to these questions.
Viewers and collectors also have responsibilities. Empathy should not become a way of congratulating ourselves for feeling. It should sharpen attention to the difference between encounter and appropriation, between curiosity and assumption. A work may invite emotional response while still asking us to recognise the limits of what we know.
This is why ambiguity can be ethically valuable. It prevents another person, place or living system from being fully mastered by interpretation. As explored in Quiet as a Contemporary Artistic Value, restraint can create a more active viewer. What is withheld becomes an invitation to look more carefully rather than a gap to be filled too quickly.
WHY EMPATHY MATTERS IN CONTEMPORARY VISUAL CULTURE
Empathy matters now not because art can provide simple agreement, but because it can preserve complexity. It creates encounters in which another presence is neither invisible nor completely explained. A portrait can hold dignity without possession. An ecological painting can make interdependence sensorial. A materially attentive work can embody care before a single word is read.
These experiences do not replace political action, environmental science or direct human relationship. Their contribution is different. Art trains attention: the capacity to notice what has been overlooked, remain with uncertainty and recognise that value exists beyond immediate usefulness or familiarity.
In contemporary visual culture, that capacity is increasingly precious. The artworks that endure are often those that resist the speed of conclusion. They give viewers a reason to return, allowing understanding to change through time. Empathy, at its most serious, is not a sentiment placed on top of such work. It is the patient practice of looking without reducing what we see.
Explore the gallery’s represented artists to discover practices in which visual intelligence, material care and human or ecological attention reinforce one another. To discuss an available work, request further context or arrange a private viewing in Chelsea, please contact Gallery Les Bois.
Live WhatsApp Chat