art at two removes
Just minutes into our interview at a gallery in Bermondsey, 30-something Jasmine Surreal pulls a toy cat from her bag and begins ventriloquizing, in a cat voice, for my benefit. “With my painting, I do nice, fantasy, imaginative things, because I’m so beautiful and glamorous like Zsa Zsa Gabor,†says…
Joy Division plus cats equals instant clickbait for this blog. But that was probably never the intention of a Stuckist painter so surreal she calls herself Jasmine Surreal. In a colourful, cat-mad show at Trispace Gallery in South London, this work brings a sobriety to proceedings, a stony sense of the…
Neo-expressionist painting, if that’s what this be, often has literal depth. Layers of paint come between viewer and canvas. And layers don’t get much thicker than those of this Mexican artist. When you square up to it, there is a material heaviness. And this translates (in our primitive minds) to…
He grew up making fantasy art. He now sells ‘fantasy’ landscapes. But there can be few artists who cleave to the tradition of painting like David Wightman. Nevermind that he says of his mountainous scenes: “They’re fictions. They’re not real places.†Visiting his studio, I was struck by the minimal…