Venue: Arcade Campfa
Exhibitions – Jason Gregory: TEN | Graham Jones: SUM OF ITS PARTS
Dates – 10/10/20 – 7/11/20
The paintings of Jason Gregory are fertile with the suggestive nature of paint. Landscapes emerge using scenes borrowed from exotic locations, fictitious narratives evidence a strange drama and lurking threat.
Recent works present with bold colour and gentle erasures, line and gesture are used to resist or release forms within the arrangements. There is a bid to create synthesis between place, object and activity, motifs reminiscent of primitive or crude structures are blended with natural events in progress.
The occupants of the landscape make intermittent visits, their presence is made known in the retrieval and what is left behind. Jason offers a landscape that is transitory, issued with contemporary anxieties and quiet humour.
Cardiff based painter Graham Jones small non-representational paintings are as much about the work’s visible contrivance as they are about the transformative process of its construction – making something out of nothing.
Each piece is always considering what constitutes a painting and what if this or that is done to it. Whilst this can result in pieces often possessing three dimensional qualities, it’s important they’re viewed within the discipline of painting.
The paintings, whilst striving for a formal integrity and directness that produces an emotional, evocative connection in the viewer, simultaneously flaunt their limited material contrivance.
Pieces usually originate using abstract geometric configurations and are executed using methods that exclude traditional expressive tropes. Through choice of scale, colour and a “handmadeness” however, the pieces seek to challenge their impersonal origins and engage with the viewer on a personal, human level. An incidental consequence is that pieces often ending up alluding to purposefully designed images in the experienced world of “things” – trademarks, confectionary, packaging etc
Conversely, a piece occasionally takes the idea of referencing a perfectly good every day, functional object and rendering it useless by turning it into a geometric abstract painting…
Although each piece is usually conceived of independently, exhibiting them
in groupings allows connections and cross references to be made within a unifying mission.
Website: www.arcade-campfa.org