Philip Jones .- House of Cards
16/Sep/2008 - 25/Oct/2008
Espacio Mínimo gallery opens its 2008-2009 season with British artist PHILIP JONES’s first Spanish solo-show. The show is made up of 5 large format paintings, and a similar number of smaller works expressly made for the show, which were started in 2007 and completed in 2008, and will be collected under the title House of Cards.
PHILIP JONES paintings are atypical, strange and mysterious, and portray a savage and colourful world. Theatrical and chameleonic characters pose within an enigmatic universe of patterns, geometry, and fluid painting. It is not difficult to track the diverse influences upon these works, from James Esnor to Willem de Kooning, from Bonnard to Josef von Stemberg, from Tal R to Picasso, from Vuillard to Cecil Beaton, from Hockney to Noël Coward, from Richard Lindner to Tallulah Bankhead…
In these works we find a structure of patterns and symbols, a fragile structure that evokes characters from playing cards. They are iconic, life size figures that pose histrionically as if taken from a 1930’s romantic comedy.
PHILIP JONES recreates a universe plagued with dandies, poets, models, and actors. Whilst impeccably dressed and excessively made-up these ambivalent, sophisticated and disturbing creatures inhabit a scenery of fragmented light. They are hermetic figures with hollow gazes, refined aesthetes, slightly perverse, and presumably immoral.
The artist uses the paint in different ways to suggest different types of light or surface, but also different feelings or emotional states creating intimate ambiguous dramas of the human condition. The paint becomes emotional material, analogous to states of mind, or emotional perceptions. His paintings are filled with sculptural figures, with optical illusions that turn into liquid paint, into light and shadow, to create a decorative, mutant world like a catalogue of patterns, colours, and forms, or a plague of signs, markings, and traces. He uses imagined symbols, metaphorical fantasies to produce dramatized moments of poetic evocations. He invents an artificial world in which elegance and coarseness, refinement and brutality live side by side.
Seen as a group, the paintings that make up House of Cards offer an exciting impression, a drama of colour, of opulence, and of trauma.
PHILIP JONES (Manchester, U.K., 1971) studied at Central Saint Martins College and at The Royal College of Art in London. From 1994 to 1996 he was granted the TI Group Painting Scholarship from The Royal College of Art and the Rome Painting Scholarship from The British School at Rome in 1997. He has shown individually at Fred in Leipzig and London, and in Goff & Rosenthal, New York, amongst others. He has taken part in group show in institucional centres Duch as New Contemporaries at Tate Gallery in Liverpool and in Camden Arts Centre in London , aswell as other art galleries such as, The Most Splendid Apocalypse at PPOW in New Cork, or Shattered Love at Keith Talent Gallery in London.
