Bradley Chriss’s 50 last days

– “I am not aiming for allegory, just the void,” writes 29-year-old Bethesda artist Bradley Chriss in his preface to “Visions from the End of the World,” his series of 50 10-by-4-inch gouache-on-paper paintings on view at Flashpoint Gallery. These nightmarish scenes are all the product of Chriss’s long ruminations on humanity’s inevitable extinction. But the color palette is bright and cheerful.

Is he celebrating humankind’s brief reign, or mocking us for attempts to sooth our semiconscious existential dread? Only the artist knows. But in offering 50 paintings of uniform dimension, his is an orderly forecast of the chaos he sees coming.