Last Friday night, I made my way to the Pembroke College JCR Art Gallery for the opening of a new show by William Andris Wood, titled De Profundis: a Journey Through Darkness in 20 Paintings. Wood is known for his macabre, dramatic and at times fatalistic art. I was excited.

With painting spanning nearly twenty years, there was not an overarching theme here, except perhaps the loyalty to Romanticism and the dramatic beauty of the lighting. Throughout, the clarity and vivacity of the light recall Caravaggio and even when the colours are muted, their depth renders them striking. The tenebrism - the harsh and luminous interplay between light and shadow - is beautifully done. It’s a sweeping, dramatic kind of illumination, one we’d see in nature in the moments golden hour falls into dusk. The shadowed backgrounds are cushy enough to sink into, and the skin throughout is also particularly excellent and unsettling - gleaming but bloodless, like a cadaver. There are Reubenesque moments in the anatomical details and even some hints of Jenny Savile in the grotesquerie.

For me, the art was most powerful when Wood was addressing his own condition. Having been plagued with various respiratory conditions his whole adult life, seven years ago he was diagnosed with a progressive and incurable genetic disorder that causes lung and liver disease. Currently, in possession of only 15% of his lung function, he is being assessed for a transplant.

In ‘COPD’ (2017) a hypnotically ambivalent self-portrait, a nude Wood sits on his bed, clutching his chest with one hand, a shiny blue inhaler in the other. There’s a stunned-animal quality to his face - it’s the kind of expression one would make unaware or uninterested in observers. There’s this strange conflict between the clear vulnerability and physicality you feel in the picture, and the staid little details of Wood’s Romantic style - the poised shading makes the image feel posed, the skin waxy. It’s quite brilliant. Its companion piece - ‘Lungs’ (2017), a still life of pig's lungs, wrapped in a sinister black bow and leaking rust-coloured juice, mucking up the butcher’s paper they lay upon, is similarly transfixing, as is Gothik Still-life with ‘Roses’ (2020), a gorgeously brittle portrait of a vase of dried roses on Wood’s desk, surrounded by personal effects, creating a delicate snapshot into his life.

Elsewhere, certain moments reached for wry humour and - for me - were some of the most tiring of the exhibit. There’s a retelling of The Beheading of Holofernes - now Hipsterfernes, complete with man-bun and wide-rimmed specs. Then there’s a portrait of Medusa recreated with the artist’s face, for no apparent reason except a bit of self-deprecating fun according to its accompanying plaque. But any sense of humility is just as quickly extinguished with another of Wood’s self-portraits, titled ‘The Lord of Darkness’ (after a nickname given to him ‘by those who know him well enough’, another is ‘Sir Andris’) which, we are told: ‘Presents the painter as the living embodiment of romanticism’

Modeled after Delacroix - a hero of the artist whose influence is abundantly visible across the collection - the painting is genuinely impressive, stately and primly foreboding. But the sheer self-indulgence of its labeling undercuts this somewhat.

This is subverted by his portraits of his long-term partner Helen and his beloved pet dog. In one of these delicate images, an ethereal woman dressed in a flowy white tunic gazes off into the mid-distance thoughtfully and in the other a pomeranian dozes on a floral cushion. Both paintings make a great argument for how closely paid attention can be synonymous with love: you feel the artist's respect and tenderness in every fine detail, from the luminosity of Helen’s skin (the most alive skin looks in the whole collection) to the greying at the dog’s muzzle. It’s effortlessly moving to witness.

Wood takes on a lot of heavy subjects, with a duty-bound solemnity. depicting beheading and suicide bombing, homelessness, a victim of knife crime and a prisoner of war.

My issue with most of Wood’s more outwarding-facing pieces is for all their grisly detail, they didn’t feel vulnerable to me, and there’s little mystery to these images. None of that grief or pain or fear is visible in these images, just a caustic indictment that borders on snideness. His selection of abused women - an acid attack victim, a portrait of Sarah Everad’s hand slipping out of a tarp in a field, and particularly an image of a violently disremembered female corpse entitled ‘#MeToo’ - inflamed something in me. It felt distasteful to me - this was not his pain to exploit, in such vivid and oddly deadening gore. Maybe the works were a noble effort of the artist railing against the rampant misogyny still prevalent in this country. Still, in the process, this patronising portrayal renders the women little more than CSI’s victims of the week.

I suppose what annoys me about this portion of the display is the subjects feel flattened, and we feel scolded. The plaque for the image of a man beheaded by ISIS reads ‘Look and Remember - this happened in your lifetime’ and one accompanying an unconscious woman in a party dress lying in the snow speaks of ‘The sheer idiocy and irresponsibility of binge-drinking culture in Britain’.

Maybe my frustration was due to the overly explanatory and ingratiating accompanying plaques and the somewhat chaotic assortment of art chosen for this particular showing. One that focused on just one of his many subjects - his portraits of the homeless, for example, or of his personal life - may have settled into revealing a deeper empathy for the artist’s subjects. As it stands, however, the William Andris Wood introduced to us through these paintings seems like a real killjoy - albeit a very finely skilled one. The paintings seem to say, listen you fools, you sheeple. Can’t you see how screwed we are?

And honestly? The artist has a lot to be mad about. We are pretty screwed. The societal issues he’s illuminating are sickening and very real. And that’s to say nothing of the shambles of the last few years; how COVID policies left those shielding on tiny rafts of safety amid a sea of shrugs. To survive this period as a shielding person, let alone keep churning out lush works of art, takes real grace and humour in the face of terror, rage and the smothering effect of indifference. It’s just frustrating that more of that battle isn’t keenly visible here. Now that would have been truly unsettling.