For his inaugural exhibition with Lisson Gallery and his first ever solo show in London, Oliver Lee Jackson presents a selection of new paintings produced over the past year. The American artist, based in Oakland, California, creates energetic fields of abstract marks that occasionally coalesce into floating forms approaching figuration. These ‘paint people’ can be glimpsed in groups or as individuals in various poses – crouched, huddled, seated, perhaps even flying – appearing in either very few brushstrokes or as indicators of spatial dynamics, sometimes accompanied by flowers, birds, hats or shoes.
Read moreWhile Jackson does indeed consider himself a figurative artist, his unique painted worlds only open up through an appreciation of the full plethora of marks he commits to each panel. Human forms mingle and merge in shimmering, skittering lines that hint both at the movement and the volume of these figures, while often comprising more or less than their prescribed number of arms or legs, with some forms shifting across planes and seemingly sliding away from view and beyond our focus. Between these groupings of figures are expanses of primed surface, punctuated by swathes of abstract gesture and bold colouration that pull these scenes beyond mere image, into zones of feeling, expression and intent. Utilizing the spatial parameters of the support he is working across, Jackson brings each composition into a state of balance and harmony, controlling each section of the work and moving the eye across his passages of oil, enamel and chalk.
This totality in his work is hard-won through six decades of rigorous practice, in which Jackson revolves around the painted arena, placed flat on trestles or directly on the studio floor. This 360-degree approach allows him to survey the entirety of the canvas or panel at any one time, in order to hold all the components together and distribute his desired effects equally. This compositional dance also reveals itself through the weightier moments of painterly line and colour, in contrast to the lighter moments provided by the chalk markings.
Objects, gestures and focal points may also arise through this process and have done repeatedly so over time. Squatting, dancing, embracing, conversing and reclining figures have been visible in various guises in Jackson’s work since the 1970s, here appearing dreamlike and only suggested in bodily fragments and feverishly repeating lines. As central as the figure remains within this body of work, Jackson himself never stands still, always keeping the field moving, keeping it flowing.
The themes of joy, abandon and serenity that might link these compositions to classical ideals or art historical precedents – of bathers or nymphs, for example – could just as likely morph into more unsettling notions of clustered, hovering or fleeing figures, depending on the perspective and mood of the beholder. It is this congregation between viewer and image that brings about the ‘intimacies’ alluded to in the title of the show. These can be tender moments of connection experienced through touch, sight or emotion or even with the physicality of the medium and material of the works themselves, or more prosaically it could refer to a closeness that comes from two parties communing in love or even while at war.
