13/02/18
Interview: Jason Brooks
Jason Brooks: The Subject is Not the Subject
Marlborough, London
9 February – 10 March 2018
For his third exhibition with
Marlborough, London, Jason Brooks (b1968) has put together a three-part show of
staggering proportions. One room is filled with his huge, incredibly detailed
and cinematically cropped, black-and-white portraits of friends and people he
considers to have a “discerning eye”. In fact, the airbrushed works are painted
solely in black, with any white areas being the paper showing through. Familiar
faces surround the viewer – writer and political commentator Will Self, artist
Sue Webster, war photographer Don McCullin, fashion designer Erdem – names we
probably recognise, but whose faces we maybe do not. Standing under the gaze of
so many supersized pairs of eyes, we, the viewer, become the viewed – an
intriguing, but unsettling experience.
In another space, Brooks is showing
his landscape works: remakes of amateur paintings he has collected over the
past couple of decades at car boot sales. Taking these vignettes as
inspiration, he “goes on a journey” with them, combining airbrush, acrylic and
oil paints in such a way as to explore all aspects of painterly language, as
well as his place within art history. In his Gloucestershire studio, he showed
us two small works bought on separate occasions, inspired by John Constable’s
The Hay Wain (1821), and clearly part of a diptych. In the gallery, viewers can
see Brooks’s response to these.
For the final space – conceived as
a darkened chapel – Brooks has created a three-metre-tall, black sculpture of
the Virgin Mary, veiled, and based on a 19th-century bust. She is surrounded by
devotional imagery of Christ and vanitas paintings.
While these three strands are quite
disparate and one might be forgiven for not immediately recognising them all as
the work of one and the same artist, Brooks argues that there is a common
thread running through his work, namely, as the title of the exhibition states,
that the subject is not the subject.
What you think you are seeing is not necessarily what you think it is at all.
But this is really only something you can discover by getting up close and
personal with his work, uncovering the startling trompe l’oeil effects, seeing
the painterly pixellation in his otherwise hyperrealist portraits, and entering
into the cinematic world that Brooks creates.
Watch this interview here