Marco Pho Grasssi
Jaybo Monk
Friendships in Art go back over time in history, one friendship that runs deep is Jaybo Monk and Marco Pho Grassi. Both artists have collaborated exhibited together and been integral in the course of each others work. The trust and support between the artists has lead to some of today’s most impressive art from both artists. Although there is a difference in subject matter Jaybo working with the figure in a large amount of his work, while Marco’s abstract canvases establish a correlation with textured and weathered walls and marks, there is still a strong resemblance in their work. There is a underlying essence in both of the artists work along, with “Savage” the artists reference this bond in their work. Jaybo who has single handedly influenced a new generation of painters in the past several years is able to remain ahead of recent trends by always progressing and allowing himself paint freely living in the moment. Marco Pho Grassi also has been an innovator in the abstract genre having started painting graffiti at an early age he was one of the first to transition over a decade ago into fine art and focus his gaze upon the abstract genre. Los Angeles is in for a treat as it will be able to witness firsthand one of the most important shows to take place this year.
GF
SAVAGE
the self effacing project
SAVAGE , SAVAGER , SAVAGEST , SAVAGE AS NAUSEAM, SAVAGED INFINITUM
The work in this show does not easily offer answers, entrances or exits.
There is nothing more than what you see in our work as the profound desire to follow a path. The path of dreaming backwards, back to the state of self-effacing. We have tried to remove the weight from the structure of stories and even from the language itself. The actual work is not what our work is but, rather, what it becomes… what is in the process of becoming.
Marco Pho Grassi, a Milanese artist, chose the rhythm of writing to accomplish a trance-similar level, where strokes become self taught live forms. In his search for true forms he approaches his work not like the construction of a building, where action is the logical steps forward from the previous one, but, on the contrary, follows the true process of construction, which involves a sort of demolition at the same time. By automatic writing and multiple layers he tends to touch the birth moment of the consciousness. The animalistic instinct and the savage stadium where, uncontrolled, the deepest inside thoughts emerge at the surface. All those `demolitions` create a dangerous space in which time travel develops where he allows us to discover a writing before consciousness.
Jaybo Monk, a French artist living in Berlin, is an outcast. His work is not to be found in a mass compatible *freeway* but more in a one-way street walked down against the flow. In his cartography of empty space and remixed genderless bodies, Jaybo tries to find that blank sheet of paper, the one that every child possess, where no explanations and no connections are useful, but just the acceptance of the fact. Places in opposition to all the other ones, which are made to allow the other space’s disappearing, to neutralize them- a non-space, local utopias which children know perfectly: the poetry of watching. It is exactly there, through poems and rescued objects, as well as in his paintings, that he improvises in his self-portraiture, tracing out the journey he’s made, by the search of his own personal Big-Bang… his own Savage state, the time before education.
The Savage state is the base of creativity: its above, its beyond and further.
And here again theories just describe our own ignorance.
