With Impression: H-Bomb, Julian Whatley turns an image of annihilation into a tightly orchestrated meditation on the politics of beauty and the failures of memory. A mushroom cloud rises from the Nevada desert while three soldiers observe in silence—a scene appropriated from a Cold War-era stock image and reworked in the language of Impressionism. The brushwork is loose, tactile, and almost luminous in its treatment of smoke and atmosphere, recalling Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, with all its industrial haze. But Whatley’s haze is nuclear.

The painting’s edges are hemmed in by vivid geometric planes in spinel red, Vandyke red, and turquoise green—colors drawn not subjectively but from Haishoku Soukan’s Dictionary of Color Combinations, linking the work to minimalist and conceptual strategies. These fields evoke both movie theater curtains and abstract paintings, placing the viewer in a state of detached spectatorship. Like the Pictures Generation artists, Whatley interrogates how history is mediated by images, how violence becomes aesthetic, and how viewers become complicit.

In Impression: H-Bomb, history is not merely remembered—it is reframed, stylized, and ultimately exposed.