Certain types of deluge, such as floods or tsunamis, replicating extensive Biblical places, sometimes, and similarly, affect the pacified order on the terrestrial surface and, exhausted of its pillage, abandon the loot in a particularly dramatic way, leaving an improvised Pangea of debris in the place of a prior order. We can imagine that an evil from Atlantis invades the land from time to time. That aftermath is the disturbed order, a creation of the natural, an unrestrained impulse of Poseidon receiving his powers from Gaia, retreating himself from the occasional rape with the terrestrial mouthpiece, trespassing the prior order and bequeathing its elements as remains. A new order imposed itself after all: the juxtaposed order of the invader element, which has left groaning its assaulted body, as after an imposed copulation.
A first possible impression for a visitant of JAS’ work, similarly, is that of a dilution on the canvas, a type of bleached deluge that, in an overlapped way, removed a former pictorial existence, placing a type of aftermath in its place. This way, among fishes and debris, we’re confronted with an inscription of an unused and diluvial order in a poriferous order of the emptiness. The angiology of the roots, the varicose ramifications of the waiting, fishes as bones crossed in the throat of time, a submerged flora but released from its mass of water, the punctuated rains intersecting the tortuous dew of the branches, the lust of the bleach washing the materials like a scorching and impenitent sun, the focus of its blazing observation. These are places of wear and tear, of penury, of remains, even remains of color, of light. The earthly places are saturated and overpopulated. The submerged places are limpid and ample. Everything that comes before the water annulment is fiercely concatenated. The water canvas claims all the space of absence for itself. The look breathes with difficulty in those huge masses of aquatic space, revolving while being caught in that empty net, struggling, twisting, and its anguish is that of a fallen acrobat, struggling in the net of its salvation and shame. We look at the empty canvas and we know that it creates a harmful atmosphere, the extermination, but also the restoration. The fish, the roots that raise, the bronchioles, the coral, everything is a figurative surrogate for a hostile element to the human footstep. A man doesn’t have ground under his feet in this amniotic oblivion.
On the fish, pelagic monad, the cities are inscribed and that’s the reason why the canvas is fundamentally empty. The fish is the minimum decomposer of creation and multiplication. It comes to determine and inhabit the empty, or at least was what remained from what has happened, of an exterminating element that contained in itself a way of perpetuation of the order against which it assailed and endangered. In the fractals of a panting fish, a city gains shape and the restoration of a civilization’s order.
Falling into the sin of comparison, guided by the satellites of the programmatic contexts, we could think of the current tendency as if we were somewhere between the final trouts of Courbet and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso’s La fôret merveilleuse, with its exotic and stubborn florescence. But it may well be that we’re before a type of minimalism that seals the light and the color as if the light and color were two substances subjected to the erosion of this urban deluge. Among the faded colors, from the inside of the pure white we observe a problem of suspended profiles, the repair of an order through the elementary lines of the rain that fishes and suspends, as by twine, the only settler: the fish. Such as in the Biblical mythography, the fish swallows the human being and sows cities, but is also a sort of Messiah, an encoded icon condensing a vast Christianity, symbol by excellence. Multiplier, the fish here is not the desolate phallus of the tired Courbet, if not the symbol of vitality with no melancholy. It’s the symbol of a painter’s vital insemination on the canvas. The canvas is the net that sifted the messianic fish. I bet and I wonder which fishes will be in the late JAS… It’s still too soon to see.
Daniel Jonas
Link – http://www.arteinstitute.org/galerias/gallery/47
