JASON BOYD KINSELLA: EMOTIONAL MOONSCAPES
Perrotin presents Oslo-based artist Jason Boyd Kinsella's exhibition EMOTIONAL MOONSCAPES. The exhibition consists of two immersive environments on the gallery's second and third floors.
February 24 – April 6, 2024
Jason Boyd Kinsella is a portraitist not much interested in what people look like. His have no people in them at all, in fact, or at least not the way we’re accustomed to seeing ourselves. Kinsella understands portraits can do one of two things: they can capture the likeness of their subject—the contours of a face, their jowliness, their creases and crags; or they can distill something truer, where likeness is secondary to affect.
While the results have the clean, highly finished surface of Google architecture or alien tesserae, their spiritual forebears are in fact the Old Masters. The classicism is all there: the 3/4 quarter pose, the finely-tuned sfumato, the fixation on linear perspective — like Rogier van der Weyden’s Portrait of a Lady stripped of flesh, reduced back down to rhomboids. Though they’re piles of blocks, they retain humanness. They emote, are inquisitive, proud, defiant, taciturn. They can be vulnerable or steely, cool or sheepish. All of this is accomplished without eyebrows.
Kinsella demands a neat order to his imagined sitters. They are built from distinct units whose contours, color and form betray their personalities, their quirks, their annoyances, their faults. They’re more ordered than a human face, except not really. Faces follow a certain logic and so too do Kinsella’s. Even though Kinsella’s portraits are personal readings of friends and acquaintances, he insists there’s no Rosetta Stone to his language. Still, it’s easy to imagine a sphere indicating a quickness to anger, or an upturned ellipsoid signifying a tendency toward making jokes to mask pain.
Like all good portraits, these characters are of their time. They share a genus with digital avatars, the selves we build to represent ourselves on the Internet, transmuting our personae via digital tools, filters, textto-image language models to produce light fictions of who we think we are. They’re contradictory in this way: flat but dimensional, referencing AI iconography but rendered by hand, talking about the digital via the analogue.
Kinsella is a sculptor who paints. He sculpts too, in the sense that he makes dimensional objects, but his paintings seem wrought out of the same tactile stuff. He manages to pull dimensionality out of paint to the point where you’re compelled to walk around it, even as you’re fully aware there’s nothing on the other side except blank canvas.
Kinsella doesn’t make self-portraits, except every picture he makes is a kind of self-portrait, his presence wrapped up in his pictures, implicated in it, “an intangible familiarity,” he calls it, a feeling that hangs between the shapes. His shapes, held together by a thin gravity, have a precarity, the feeling that things could easily come undone. This makes them, in the end, about life — stubbornness in the face of impermanence.