Introduction by Maite van Dijk Senior Curator of Paintings, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam
In 1874, long before Vincent van Gogh decided to become an artist himself, he wrote in a letter to his brother Theo: “Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.” Nature became his most important source of inspiration in his later paintings and drawings. Van Gogh’s incredible eye for detail and for the beauty of his surroundings continues to move and inspire people to this day. Van Gogh’s words apply equally to the artistic vision and philosophy of the British artist Jason Brooks (b. 1968). In an age when the digital world is increasingly dominant, Brooks investigates how the power of painting can alter and enrich our perception of the everyday. Brooks’s paintings originate in very diverse art objects—from amateur landscapes he finds in charity shops or on eBay to poems by the famous nineteenth-century poet John Clare.
He uses and quotes or paraphrases the work of others to translate that inspiration into a new pictorial language. His inspirations cannot necessarily be recognized in the finished work. As Brooks himself says: “the art is in how you stray, not how closely you follow the original”. Brooks is fascinated by the language of paint and its transformative effect. Just like Van Gogh, he invites us through his painting to look differently at everyday. The artist titles this as “the
subject is not the subject”. In a series of paintings—two made especially for the exhibition in the Van Gogh Museum—Brooks reflects on Van Gogh’s work. Countering the widespread romantic myth that Van Gogh was an impulsive artist, Brooks contends—rightly—that every one of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes was considered and purposeful.
Brooks has looked very hard at Van Gogh’s work (Wheatfield with Crows and Tree Roots, for instance, can be seen as sources of inspiration) but nowhere does he simulate or imitate. Brooks is concerned with a visual language at meta-level, a language in which all the different sources are forged into a new whole. Brooks builds his paintings up slowly, using an eclectic
assortment of materials and techniques—from airbrushing to oil paint. Through this complex and sometimes confusing layering of media and materials, the artist invites us to look extra closely—and perhaps to see more. To see more in Brooks’s own superb paintings, and in Vincent van Gogh’s, too. In other words, Brooks gets us to look at and think about his own methods, artistic vision and philosophy, and Van Gogh’s. Such artistic inspiration and interaction between artists is precisely what Van Gogh so passionately longed for: “Painters—to speak only of them—being dead and buried, speak to a following generation or to several following generations through their works.” Van Gogh and his work live on in modern and contemporary art. The Van Gogh Museum has been making small exhibitions of modern and contemporary art since 2014. These interventions in the last gallery of the museum show the way many generations of artists have drawn inspiration from Van Gogh’s work. There have been displays of paintings by Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Willem de Kooning, John Chamberlain, Peter Doig, Matthew Day Jackson and others. Jason Brooks’s richly layered paintings are a powerful and inspiring continuation of this series.
19 October 2019 – 20 January 2020
Will Self produced this Video Portrait for Jason Brooks’ most recent exhibition ‘The Subject is not the Subject’ at Marlborough Fine Art, February 2018. The video was shot within the same aspect ratio as the 8 portraits produced and was displayed alongside them in the gallery.
For his third exhibition with Marlborough, London, Jason Brooks (b1968) has put together a three-part show of staggering proportions. One room is filled with his huge, incredibly detailed and cinematically cropped, black-and-white portraits of friends and people he considers to have a “discerning eye”. In fact, the airbrushed works are painted solely in black, with any white areas being the paper showing through. Familiar faces surround the viewer – writer and political commentator Will Self, artist Sue Webster, war photographer Don McCullin, fashion designer Erdem – names we probably recognise, but whose faces we maybe do not. Standing under the gaze of so many supersized pairs of eyes, we, the viewer, become the viewed – an intriguing, but unsettling experience.
In another space, Brooks is showing his landscape works: remakes of amateur paintings he has collected over the past couple of decades at car boot sales. Taking these vignettes as inspiration, he “goes on a journey” with them, combining airbrush, acrylic and oil paints in such a way as to explore all aspects of painterly language, as well as his place within art history. In his Gloucestershire studio, he showed us two small works bought on separate occasions, inspired by John Constable’s The Hay Wain (1821), and clearly part of a diptych. In the gallery, viewers can see Brooks’s response to these.
For the final space – conceived as a darkened chapel – Brooks has created a three-metre-tall, black sculpture of the Virgin Mary, veiled, and based on a 19th-century bust. She is surrounded by devotional imagery of Christ and vanitas paintings.
While these three strands are quite disparate and one might be forgiven for not immediately recognising them all as the work of one and the same artist, Brooks argues that there is a common thread running through his work, namely, as the title of the exhibition states, that the subject is not the subject. What you think you are seeing is not necessarily what you think it is at all. But this is really only something you can discover by getting up close and personal with his work, uncovering the startling trompe l’oeil effects, seeing the painterly pixellation in his otherwise hyperrealist portraits, and entering into the cinematic world that Brooks creates.
Interview by ANNA McNAY – Studio International
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY
The Ideas Man: Jason Brooks
Jason Brooks is fascinated by the traditional medium of paint but, like his YBA peers who rose to fame in the 1990s, his approach isn’t old-school, it’s conceptual. Prepping in his Gloucester studio for his enigmatically titled forthcoming show, The Subject is Not the Subject, he says the title explains the “whole premise behind all of the work”, which encompasses a wide vocabulary of painting from airbrush and acrylic to oils.
The exhibition will comprise his landscapes, inspired by amateur paintings that he’s collected over 20 years from thrift stores and car-boot sales, to his hyper-real portraits of friends and his devotional works and objects. “I’m interested in the language of painting and how it has the potential to transform the subject to see it afresh,” he says, adding, “Growing up in Yorkshire we didn’t have high art on the walls, but something similar to the paintings that I collect. There is a love invested within them and a desire to succeed, even though failure is round the corner. We need to embrace that, it’s a wonderful thing.”
As the partner of Porter editor, Lucy Yeomans, Brooks’ sartorial tastes are highly evolved – Belstaff and Triple RRR Apparel are favourites – although fashion is rarely discussed at home and it’s strictly ‘no-frills’ in the studio.
“Clothes are to do with context, so I’d wear a fitted suit to a dinner,” he says. “I’m interested in the details of clothes, but spend the majority of time not being bothered whatsoever.”
The Subject is Not the Subject is showing from 9 February to 10 March 2018, at Marlborough Fine Art, London; marlboroughlondon.com
Link to full article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/art/richard-wentworth-gavin-turk-pioneering-male-artists-changing/
Tim Marlow interviews Jason Brooks about Truth and Likeness’. Episode 5 of the popular series hosted by Tim Marlow sees Jason Brooks and Maggi Hambling discuss the scope and capability of a portrait and what truth an artist can realistically tell of the sitter within portraiture.
The Royal Society is pleased to announce the unveiling of a recently commissioned portrait of Sir Paul Nurse PRS by Jason Brooks.
Official Presidential portraits date back to the origins of the Royal Society in 1660 when Presidents and eminent scientists would donate their own oil portraits to grace the Society’s rooms.
Since 1941 a portrait of each President of the Royal Society has been commissioned following the end of the Presidential term of office, as a mark of gratitude for their services.
The unveiling was hosted by Royal Society Vice-President and Biological Secretary Sir John Skehel FRS.
February 27, 2017
On May 22, a group of new patrons to the National Portrait Gallery visited the studio in Gloucestershire for a talk with Richard Dyer, which explored Jason’s fascination with imagery and how The Subject is not the Subject.
