Here is a photo Recap of Jaybo Monk’s recent solo exhibition in London at Rook & Raven titled “Game Lapse”. Jaybo goes deep in the new exhibition channeling some of his deepest depths as an artist. This new body of work may resemble Jaybo Monk, but something about it resonates just a little more with us. Jaybo is able to take inspiration from the recent London games and draw upon its imagery to create stirring paintings and installations. Meticulously rendered figures are cut and composed in the paintings. The softest touches are in the random acts of creation that Jaybo is able to juxtapose against the representational elements in the work. A perfectly placed mistake resembles string or rope adding to the already symbolic pieces. Nostalgic installations of sports objects invoke memories of past conquests now left for the artist to find use of. By placing these installations with the paintings Jaybo gives the viewer a complete experience of visual and emotional triggers. Texture is not only laid in paint but also in the leathery sports artifacts. A nice surprise was seeing the black and white pieces that Jaybo made that night. A spectacular exhibition that we strongly suggest you visit before it closes.
GF
“My interest is in the primacy of progress, in the way it proceeds, which will be by seeing the work come into being.”
Jaybo is an urban wanderer, a traveler that moves in the space of that unfinished metropolis, that is the world, among memories, fragments and traces abandoned in the urban landscape, that works like a theater of the human joy and pain, studded with relationships that slide between first glances and deep emotions.
In his composite artworks he allows himself to search the process, he wants the venture upon something he didn’t have in mind before.
By using a pile of images and “souvenirs”, some snippets of his visual memories, he has somewhere this little one treasure he picks up – this one image he needs this very moment to pin up his storyboard to get whatever he composes into the flow of life .
Jaybo is interested in human relationships and the only way for him to deal with those, is to create a visual vocabulary of stereotypes of the human behavior. By working with motives from vintage photos, which are separated from their original context and painted on canvas, he succeeds to neutralize their original contents. By using this fragments he discovers them anew and gives them a new content. He creates a way to make a psychological image that can be accepted because it is detached, it is fragmented, it has its own space, its own frame and all of those fragments create a narrative situation without being narrative art. In doing so, the viewer of the painting is invited to bring something personal to the piece by himself and completes the act of art.
“Game Lapse” is the attempt to respond and communicate between viewer and painter on a common base – the olympic games – in a very emotional and expressive form, breaking the law of the narrative situation and playing with our primary ideas of movement and time. The quest of this show is to cultivate a kind of improvisation using well-known body parts and geometric shapes and giving them new directions.
Jaybo believes in the anarchistic harmony which is based on autonomous responsibility of composition. By his technique of hijacking the meaning of visual images – in this case of the olympic games – Jaybo provokes a vacuum which he refers to as visual silence – which forces the viewer to make his own decisions and rediscover his own self. Jaybo´s art is a bit like opening a book by asking the reader to close it.
Jaybo has been living in Berlin since 1986, is co-founder of the culture and fashion magazine Style and the Family Tunes and the fashion label Iriedaily. Since 2005 he has been showing his work regularly in international galleries. He has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Perth and Melbourne. He is a member of the London-based artist collective “Agents of Change” and is considered to be at the vanguard of the Graffuturism movement. Jaybo’s work has its roots in street art, but nowadays is attributed more to the world of fine art.
