33 Contemporary Gallery | 1/5-2/28 | Chicago, IL

Concealment and Discovery

33 Contemporary Gallery presents the psychological paintings of Jason John in an upcoming show.

Jason John is interested in how we attempt to capture human identity. “If you try to tell a story of who you are, [each time you tell it], it’s never the same. We tend to elaborate, forget, fill in the blanks,” he says. “How do we ever meet one’s true identity?” The artist—who has always been drawn to portraiture and the way it confronts the idea of portrayal—represents the figure “ensnared in environments of uneasiness and flux.” The individuals in his paintings gaze at the viewer, and yet are partially concealed by veiling and distortion. There’s connection and disconnection happening simultaneously, and that complicated relationship between subject and viewer continuously fascinates him.Double Trouble, oil and surgical thread on polyester, 40 x 40"

“One of the things I started to do was take pieces of older paintings and sew them with surgical thread to paintings [I was currently working on], using them to veil the figure to some degree,” John explains.From my Vantage Point, oil on polyester, 40 x 30"

“I used surgical procedures the way you’d suture a body together.” While experimenting, he combined older pieces with new ones for the first few works, but after that began painting all new pieces that he’d then blend and sew together. This venture is new for the artist, something he’s dived into in 2021. And beginning this January, Chicago-based 33 Contemporary Gallery will showcase this body of work in a solo exhibition for the artist. Walter as Detroit, oil on polyester, 40 x 30"

The Wrestler, oil and surgical thread on polyester, 40 x 30"

In a way, John has been approaching these latest paintings as both an artist and a surgeon. He explains that through YouTube he’s learned how surgeons suture bodies together and sew wounds. “It’s fun and meditative too,” John explains the process. “You have this rounded needle and the way it works is it would go into the skin and loop around and come back out…[So when working on my pieces] I have to get behind the painting and loop it around and out. You wrap it around these special pliers for sutures and you go around and pull the other piece out through the loop. It’s this very methodical thing...So the piece I’m adding is sutured through the stretched canvas.” He adds that after the pieces are sewed onto the canvas, they often get these wavy curvatures, and you can peek under the sewn part. “And so the painting continues underneath,” he says. This is yet another element John has been playing with, sometimes adding more paint after each piece has been sewed on, which “leads to a little bit of discovery.”MTRAN, oil and surgical thread on polyester, 30 x 30"