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(cover)JON WEALLEANS ©1 Resonator guitar 201350 x 50cm 19.75 x 19.75in
‘Jon Wealleans, fine and honest artist that he is, paints because he knows how intrinsic to his
own creative process is the concept of ordered chaos: a seemingly random agglomeration of
objects, that yet contain within their interrelation the lineaments of the mind that assembled
them. In this sense, Jon’s paintings are in fact evocations of shamanic ‘symbol sets’: ritual
objects that are arranged then rearranged in order to provoke remote effects.’
Will Self
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JON WEALLEANS Post-Pop Epiphanies9 April – 15 May 2014 Francis Kyle Gallery
Connoisseur of the curious, the arcane and sometimes the outright preposterous, Jon Wealleans has been mining two complementary seams for Post-Pop Epiphanies, his third one-person exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery. For the new still lifes and interiors he has taken his inspiration, first, from the numerous and diverse collections of objects (agglomerations, as he prefers to call them) – a mingling of cherished finds with ephemera ranging from tin toys to rare Art Deco pieces, Jugendstil vases and pop artefacts to Victorian and contemporary tourist paraphernalia – which have caught his fancy over the years and now preside like an occupying army over most of his living space. In tandem, he has turned his subversive compositional sense to the plants and flowers which everywhere border and embrace this space.
In a vision unmistakeable in its brilliance of palette and unremitting intensity of focus, we are invited with Wealleans’ Post-Pop Epiphanies to share the world of a distinguished, idiosyncratic architect turned painter of still lifes and interiors. With such a career trajectory, it is only fitting, indeed, that two Italian designers stand out for him as his chief influences: Alessandro Mendini, creator of mobile infinito, philosophic furniture, and most specially Ettore Sottsass, progenitor of the Memphis movement and super-sensual apostle of creative kitsch favouring artificial materials such as plastic laminates.
Jon Wealleans has often painted flowers so startling they suck the viewer through new doors of heightened perception into another dimension. Flowers return now in abundance but with another agenda. These include a sequence of smaller works which started life as fast watercolours, recording the fall of cast shadows. They were then reworked as oils cropped to a square format, suggesting, as Wealleans comments, a pastiche of the seed packets available at any garden centre, which feature images of impossibly exotic blooms such as Himalayan poppies.
Wealleans’ flowers portray a world of orchid languor glowing in lurid colours, outdoors and exposed to sunlight quite contrary to the traditional flower composition and seeming to constitute, as Proust wrote of the roses painted by his imaginary Elstir, ‘a new variety with which this painter, like some clever horticulturalist, has enriched the Rose family’. The particular strangeness of those faultless floral compositions by the Dutch masters, in which the paintings took shape over successive months with new flowers added as they came into seasonal bloom, is now replaced by Wealleans with another kind of strangeness, one arising from the absence of the usual, single light source, its place taken by an even, diffused halogen lighting mirroring the ubiquitous flood of light of the contemporary interior.
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10 Colour chaos theory 201480 x 80cm 31.5 x 31.5in
11 Reading room chaos 201380 x 60cm 31.5 x 23.5in
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15 Hyacinths and Iris 201230 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
16 Clematis Trellis V 201330 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
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Jon Wealleans (born Yorkshire 1946) studied architecture at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art followed by post-graduate studies in Design at the Royal College of Art, where he is now an Honorary Fellow. Attracted from the start in his architectural studies by the arts of perspective and the study of shadows as taught in sciagraphy, Wealleans relished the computer-free environment of the time with its encouragement to wander between different departments and disciplines.
Wealleans’ career in architecture began with his work with the Building Design Partnership, then Foster Associates before he went on to develop his own practice. In the 1960s he designed shops for the now legendary Mr Freedom and other pop-linked environments as well as furniture which gave him a high public profile and appearances on two BBC TV programmes, Design by Five. Concurrently, Wealleans taught architecture and design at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, the Royal College of Art and Kingston University. At around this time he collaborated also with rock musicians and their management, including the Elton John Organisation and Led Zeppelin. Having always painted, though self-taught, Wealleans has devoted increasing time to his painting since the 1990s, and has participated in several of the Gallery’s theme exhibitions including Roma (2000), Lair of the Leopard (2005), : Contemporary painters from the West winter in Russia (2008), This twittering world: Contemporary painters celebrate TS Eliot’s four QuartetS (2011) and Jumping for Joyce: Contemporary painters revel in the world of James Joyce (2013). One-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery 2009, 2011 and 2014.
JON WEALLEANS
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1 Resonator guitar 2013 50 x 50cm 19.75 x 19.75in
2 Clematis 2012 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
3 Colchicum (water lily) 2012 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
4 BBC Radio 6 Music 2014 50 x 50cm 19.75 x 19.75in
5 Bathroom shelf 2013 50 x 50cm 19.75 x 19.75in
6 Purple polyanthus 2012 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
7 Irises 2012 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
8 Dahlia 2012 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
9 French country circus 2012 80 x 80cm 31.5 x 31.5in
10 Colour chaos theory 2014 80 x 80cm 31.5 x 31.5in
11 Reading room chaos 2013 80 x 60cm 31.5 x 23.5in
12 Pansies VII 2013 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
13 Auto-focus overload 2014 50 x 50cm 19.75 x 19.75in
14 Bathroom mirror 2013 50 x 50cm 19.75 x 19.75in
15 Hyacinths and Iris 2012 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
16 Clematis Trellis V 2013 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
17 Wild flowers and scent 2012 50 x 50cm 19.75 x 19.75in
18 Motion, stream of consciousness 2012 50 x 50cm 19.75 x 19.75in
19 Tulips IV 2012 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
20 Roses VI 2013 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
21 Tulips III 2012 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
22 Portrait of the artist 2012 50 x 50cm 19.75 x 19.75in
23 3-D spectacle 2014 50 x 50cm 19.75 x 19.75in
24 Tulips and poppies 2012 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
25 Tulips II 2012 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
26 Poppies 2012 30 x 30cm 11.75 x 11.75in
All works oil on canvas
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‘My paintings have all been made from existing, accidental and non-contrived arrangements
of objects, furniture and artefacts – they are never ‘set-up’ or constructed as a deliberate still life
scene… The complexity of a still life with seemingly random patches of colour can sometimes
devolve into an abstract pattern – perhaps aspiring to the textile design type of imagery that can
be seen in the background of some Gustav Klimt paintings. My original training in modernist
architectural tradition has always been the source of a dilemma, in that I was drawn away
from the Bauhaus methodology towards the more anti-rationalist architects and designers like
Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and later I latched onto the super-sensuous
designers of the sixties. The ensuing problem I encountered, which may be reflected in my
paintings, is the development of the nagging question: do the Modernists, originally championed
by Adolf Loos, continue to dismiss and banish applied decoration because they didn’t like it or
because they couldn’t do it?’
Jon WealleanS
FRANCIS KYLE GALLERY9 MADDOX STREET LONDON W1S 2QET +44 (0)20 7499 6870/6970 F +44 (0)20 7495 0180OPEN WEEKDAYS 10AM – 6PM SATURDAYS 11PM – 5PMwww.franciskylegallery.com franciskylegallery@gmail.com
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