Charles Lewis Art - California

Expressions of an Inner Space – Jupiter7’s World of Wonders

By Peter Simplex, art editor

Committee on Symbolic Activities

In one day, one hour really, my gloom about the state of painting lifted and I laughed. My brain laughed, and I got out a good belly laugh too. I entered the world of Jupiter7. This is a virtually unknown artist from California who has, shall we say, an extra-social view of the art world.

            Last week I received a mysterious phone call from an English art collector commanding me to a special viewing of Jupiter7 original paintings, brought together as a one-time event by the handful of his collectors in the UK. This private showing took place amid an intentional theatre spectacle of security, complete with guest blindfolds, street artists (or something) in mock-Arab wraparound white sheets loudly protesting the showing, and a bevy of large men with short hair and cheap suits whispering into flowers pinned at their shoulders as though they were two-way communication devices – maybe they were?. These are my impressions.

            First of all, I’m told that most Jupiter7 paintings are so-called “portraits,” meaning that they typically have one or several central figures in the fore- to middle-ground plane. The figures may or may not be looking at or interacting with the viewer. From what I saw (‘experienced’ might be a better word), the figures exist entirely within their own world, which is clearly defined and organized. I have never felt that I had so little control over my viewing experience – each painting immediately took control in a way that forcibly commanded my attention, my “eye,” into a kind of orchestrated orbit around the picture, stopping at various junctures where interesting things await. The artist capably uses both low- and high-contrast values to achieve discrete loci of intense focus. In particular, the clever use of very similar adjacent values of different colors and textures intentionally strains the eye against its training (i.e. drawn to contrasting values), invoking a peculiar tension and intensity that holds one’s attention to a place on the canvas until it is released to move on.        

The surprising lucidity of their contents and the reassuring clarity with which they are painted is the result of intensifying simple things as spectacle, even beauty. The irresistible churn of heroic forms results in persistent esoteric diversions seemingly tailored to conflate the visual as a kind of interjection reinforcing and recapitulating its temporal and harmonic relationships. As the artist sets in motion a process of maximum rendition we see a powerfully distilled sense of continually unfolding discovery that encompasses matter, time and space manifested as a sort of synesthetic response to a visceral cross-sensory experience.

            By filling the painting’s spaces with oddly tactile presences, Jupiter7’s elaborate compositional networks bathe the viewer in subdued, glowering colors that reinforce the sensuousness of an expansive and delightfully old-fashioned cascade of figurations. The ever-present, rock-solid foreground images always suggest the dichotomy and anomalies of nature overcoming isolation. At the same time, the negative spaces force the breath from your body in this phenom­enologically altered visionary world.

            As a visual alchemist with a fierce and sometimes complicated relationship that continually mutates and disassembles itself into strangely eviscerated picture planes, the artist fills the resulting space with creatures and proto-humans that look like they have been excised and invaded by a series of convulsive tectonic injectures.  Each picture is a kind of alchemical phe­nomenon, a presence that has been born whole and has subsequently leapt into the future to escape the onslaught of civilization.

            Full of gauzy and childlike awe, the compositions can be seen as endangered, renovated beyond quick recognition, highly engaging or even cinematic. Such a lush rhizome of rich, ungoverned allusions conveys a sensual mix of life and loss that con­sciously or accidentally seems to channel deep species-memory that is at once tribal, pagan and ecclesiastic.

            By rejecting the remote and stuffed abstraction that has been part of our collective mem­ory for decades, these pictures unleash porten­tous energy, urgency, irony and detachment, sometimes veering toward moody reflections of angst that encompass loose, expressionistic figuration and heighten the pictorial fragmentation yet bypass the detritus and follies of popu­lar culture. Alternatively, the viewer may seize on the gravity of memento mori, with a sensuousness that camouflages a multitude of narratives syn­thesized from an ocean of sources, disparate references and esoteric con­nections.

            Whenever a work of art induces a sense of displacement it invokes the possibility of new beginnings. In these works, oblivion, fame and obscurity share the stage with impermanence, identity and perception in a quirky, darkly humorous critique of modern life.

            The artist’s painted objects can be experienced as vehicles for psychic channeling, as layers of conceptual irony freeze, then isolate in time, an existentialist stance that contains a new configuration for our contemplation. Admittedly, these paintings’ carefully packaged subversion simultane­ously mocks and pays homage to a brave new world of …well, something strange!  

            I believe that whenever an artist tries to balance visual pizzazz and ironic insouciance, we must confront the simple fact that transcendence is a delusion, whether sold by aesthetic agnostics or nihilist atheists offering up the old epiphanies and long-dead issues of religious mystery. However, with Jupiter7 we need not worry about an ego becalmed by meditation or prayer; his paintings joyously extract the most ludicrous elements of surrealist paintings, with their haunting absences and symbols of dead faiths. Each suggestion of ambivalence and transformation is counterbalanced by an uncanny ability to split the difference between object and symbol. Fully using the potential inherent in the virginal expansive­ness of the great spaces, the artist skillfully balances lonely yet inviting presences with wild, high-contrast colors that provide an armature for reverie and phantasmagoria, more dreamscape than land­scape. 

            To say that these works do not remotely aspire to minimalist elegance does not fully distill the kernel of the artist’s strong suit, which is in the province of a preter­natural subject matter whose presence exudes an effectively paradoxical duality of luxuriance and chastity.  The imperious, ascetic beauty attained through not-entirely subdued earthy col­ors is both stable and iconic, with nuanced, bare gradations that enter more deeply into space, suggesting a solidly con­textual, conceptual aspect supplanted by realistic objects.

            Even when Asian-esque images predominate, the artist further westernizes an immigrant construct full of paradoxes and contradictions, resulting in an art of clashing encounters.  Each painting is a complete ren­dering of a hypothetical construction that occasionally riffs on Dada and Surrealism while unifying and simplifying an unseen but strongly felt psychic horizon.

            In every work, a glow seems to emanate from the ‘skin’ of the paint, as though imbued with silence and waiting with a heroic, though often bittersweet air. Nowhere, for example, do we see any trace of faith in social progress; instead we see places where identities and borders have become unreal, even ripped from a mountain of wholesome­ness and torn open strictly in terms of theoretical coding.  Everywhere you look is the spectacular collapse of lofty thinking, completely lacking the ironic enticement that is the flashy dung heap of popular culture.

            Too often these days, painters are seduced by object painting and the polymorphic democracy of media, whose apparent lack of depth they personally challenge in brooding, tactile works that confront the viewer with the specter of cultural memory. But going beyond culture, Jupiter7 reconciles personal identity with larger human histories that are both visually expansive and content-rich. Every juxtaposition of atypical dualities results in colorful characters, some humorous and others cutting, that exult in their position of visually dynamic deity.

            Starting from an unknown point of departure usually fuses past and present cultures and attitudes into a challenge to the artist’s enlightened, surprised, and sometimes shocked conceptu­al engagement and strong textural presence. The spontaneity and improvisation associated with narrative or mythological overtones can lead to only two possible choices in an idiomatic investigation: experimentation validated by the end result, or alternate manifestations to establish credibility in other dimensions. No other outcomes are possible. Clearly, the artist has chosen the latter.

            Other reviewers have opined that Jupiter7’s mutability in such a fluid medium is not natural, drizzled with darkness yet parading rosy undertones in a cheerful experimentation of free-spirited jubilance. Then you realize that there really is no dark underbelly, no soliloquies about the experiences that inform those choices. The repeated use of primitive motifs, representing beliefs or interests and featuring dark creatures with a mischievous candor, are meticulously and warmly painted.

            Transgression and beauty are cousins, are they not? Breezy gems whose sole fixation is to escape repression and fear at the hands of a violent society. That of course is simply a metaphor for self-imposed inhibitions in the face of dysfunction­al and hypocritical power structures. Even as the artist forges engaging, beautiful objects, a network of emotive connections based on strange alchemy allows for shared consciousness amid inherent disorder.