James Jean

New York City

Renowned as an illustrator, comic book artist and fashion and jewelry designer, James Jean has channeled much of his energy into his painting over the last several years. His new body of work is a fusion of personal and universal themes, realism and mythology.

Jean’s work has been influenced by as diverse sources as Chinese scroll painting, Japanese woodblock prints, Northern Renaissance art and Durer etchings, and it evokes the worlds of M.C. Escher, Aubrey Beardsley and Hieronymous Bosch as well as psychedelic artists of the sixties. His work nevertheless is rooted firmly in a contemporary vision that brings to mind Lisa Yuskavage, Neo Rauch, Alexis Rockman and Takashi Murakami, among others. Allegory and realism combine to create an interior world rooted in the present.

The core of Jean’s work lies in his obsessive, detailed linear pen and ink drawings that fill countless notebooks and inform virtually all his creative output. Jean’s larger drawings suggest personal fairy tales that merge with decorative abstraction, whereas his paintings capture individual narrative moments and comment on contemporary life. Even in these, abstract drips of paint or grids of dots overlaid on the image draw the paintings back into an imaginary dream world where nothing is as stable as it appears. This duality is also emphasized in a few paintings that were created as diptychs, pairings of representational rectangular paintings with Wave tondos, more abstract, digitally produced images of crashing waves. As Jean states, “These images represent separate realities, but there is a relationship and tension between the images when they are paired together.”

James Jean

Tilton Gallery

January 9 – February 16, 2013
8 East 76 Street
New York, NY 10021
USA

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