Donot Miss this Opening tonight at Soze Gallery, Jaybo Monk “Nowhere is Now Here”

GF

 

 

I am going nowhere, dressed with my dreams. Dreaming to tears, hard as death in spring. Dreaming, torn between here and there. Where, finally nothing looks like nothing. Dreaming until I can’t speak any more, maybe just a bit with the tip of my eyes, watching me unchallenging
believing I wasn’t in need
dreaming even too much
dreaming even bad
burning even
when all is
burned
out

 

Jaybo Monk on Nowhere is Now Here:

Jaybo monk seeks distance, whether he is going somewhere or going nowhere. He watches a nearby point, possibly looking nowhere…possibly not even looking. His apparently inexhaustible pictorial world poses questions to the audience again and again. Do the protagonists touch each other or not? Are they turned inward upon themselves or do they create a spectacle? The eye roams the canvas and finds itself in confusing spaces, wandering through a bizarre landscape, always seemingly infected with the incurable disease of modern times: Loneliness.

Jaybo Monk creates hermetic pictorial scenes, wresting from them realities of life, dreams, and moments of daydream. He gives the canvas a puzzle of bodies, forms, and contents, within greys and washed out colors of a yesteryear that has arrived in the presence. These works, in which times time seems to stand still, reflect his personal and social ruptures. With Nowhere is Now Here, Jaybo tries to help us to realize the ambiguities of our times.

“I paint cathedrals of bodies opening up to each other,” says the French born Berlin painter, “I need to be the metaphor’s scream.” Both the paintings and sculptures from his last body of work show that religious and political imaginings of salvation see us all in exile, as passing figures in a world that is familiar yet often alien. That feeling of being an alien, that mixture of feelings, experiences, dreams, yearnings, nightmares, persistent lounging, and irrecoverable losses. That is his art. Nowhere is Now Here claims the border of the present as there and only there, in the vacuum of self- invalidating tendencies where we find the possibility to escape an endangered world. This is the basis of Jaybo Monk art.