• MA Printmaking Royal College of Art [2001-03] • Fine Art Graduate. Falmouth College of Arts [1997 – 2000] • Post Compulsory Certificate in Education. Greenwich Maritime University [2007 – 2008]
• Tutor London College of Communication Graphic Design Foundation and CMP Diploma in Image Production • Print Technician K2 Screen Fine Art Screen Printers Clerkenwell London [2004-2007]
Founded Blacklist Editions Screen Print Service for Paper and Textiles [2008 - 2019]
Founded paperHAUS Screen Print Service for Paper and Textiles [2019 - present]
Print graduate of the Royal College of Art, Jonas is an artist based in East London whose work falls into two main categories which encompass the twin strands of both Fine Art Practice and silk screen print making.
Current portrait works take inspiration from the visual imagery of popular culture of the 1980s, it’s world of fashion, music, and youth. Portrayed in a classical manner from the neck up, taken at a three-quarters angle, each portrait is an exploration of performance, glamour, personality, novelty, surface, colour, mass production, nightclubs, Eurotrash, pop, the future.
Images merge in a tense photo-realistic style that is as vivid as it is empty, appearing as they do to be devoid of underlying or hidden concepts. It is a retro futurism, identifying the future as a style infused with nostalgia, irony, and a time-bending dislocation. It offers futuristic visions articulated in a retro style, creating a back-and-forth dialogue between the past and the future.
It features an interchange of harder and softer lines, bright and shiny colour in the photorealistic vein. There is a tension created between clear and blurred lines tracing the outline of the figure’s face, clothing and jewellery. Hyper-exposed faces emerge from the illustration’s background, and are confined to some basic facial features. The bright reds on the lips or cheeks in the portrait provide a youthful tone. No time and space are suggested, forms float in an imaginary time space, which can only partially be indicated by the slight fashion details. Constant intertextual interplay evokes complex feelings of nostalgia that represent the past with a sadness that is blended with a small measure of pleasure, a yearning for the past decades, a clear vision of a luxurious escapist world. These female portraits call one like a Siren to escape into the near future or the long-forgotten past with an explosion of pigments.
The works seek to merge a number of painterly appearances and techniques within each. The screen print process used to print the images, though very technical in its application, replicates brush and spray marks and gestures. The soft sprayed look of the art produces a highly aestheticized, nostalgic art language that is devoid of genuine historicity , and uses this method of pastiche in a manner that subverts dominant discourses by creatively merging of different artistic styles and popular culture elements in a way that challenges the once characteristic dichotomy between highbrow and lowbrow culture.
Spray paint techniques rather than being the preserve of the street artist (sic), have featured among the materials employed in the work of artists Lucio Fontana, Richard Hamilton, Yves Klein, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Harnessing the gestural, unpredictable, projectile qualities of spray paint, these artists and others have repurposed it as an alternative to the brush, to create hazy textures, drips & puddles. Spray paint has offered artists an immediacy, the ability to improvise, and versatility.
Original drawings once scanned are produced using the CMYK Four Colour Process technique. Colours are individually applied, starting with Cyan, and then the rest of the process colours applied in the order, cyan, magenta and black. Each colour is applied in a set pattern of tiny dots that appear to create a solid colour, similar to the pixels on a digital image. Layers of these dots in different amounts of ink create any shade or colour.
TheLandscape works by contrast engage with the aesthetic experience that emerges from perceiving boundless landscape. Through obtrusive factures, exaggerated distortions of scale, darkness, obscurity, privation and vastness, the images encompass subjects relating to the apocalyptic, biblical and the sublime. Lacking a human presence, the landscapes occlude any sense of scale, deliberately making it difficult to ascertain the actual scale of the imagined realm. This in turn heightens the role of the spectator in beholding the scene. The effect is to alienate the viewer from the composition, positing the question of nature’s indifference to man.
The rich & seductive quality of theselandscape prints however are in contrast with what is depicted, sometimes drawing connotations to beauty as well as the grotesque. Fabricating hand drawn images, photographs, both painting & digital painting, traditional themes of landscape are reconfigured. The resultant interest lies in the artistic momentum of filtering, levelling and balancing out the pictorial qualities of this material with digital processes. Achieved then, through treatment in both digital conversion and CMYK colour half tone separation silkscreen technique, final pieces consist of large printed works which are visually complex and often cartographic in form.
Works incorporate a visual language that simultaneously monumentalises and dissolves form. A sense of immersion pervades, the luminal space traversing fact and feeling. The Landscapes become a metaphysical realm for the purging of emotional trauma. Cloud expresses the aphophatic nature of the divine, the unknowable, that which will forever elude our human understanding. Having then a symbolic meaning, the landscape depicted thus veils the distance and cast shadows across the landscape. The aspect of the cloud as symbolic form, as phenomena and appearance, always in a state of metamorphosis, which obscure the immutable quality of higher truth, cloud representing the unseen God, veiling the sky.
Cloud is a gift from the spiritual realm. Mist is the gentle rain of fertility, the sacred substance that impregnates our mind and spirit, enabling our thoughts and insights to grow and blossom. It is the warm, enveloping caress of divinity letting us know that what we are looking for is almost within our sight.
Accumulation of historical & mythological research has formed the basis for these configurations, one in which associations between religious constructions, quasi-science and fictional architecture are a re-occurring features. There is a deliberate sense of unease. To make anything truly terrifying, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the extent of any danger, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Life disappears in the magnitude and remoteness of the perspective. It also functions to bring examples of the ‘ancient’ into an uneasy conjunction with the present . The overpowering taps into our apocalyptic anxieties through the presentation of an apparent paradox which destabilizes our sense of the truth.
