Galleri Urbane is pleased to host Jeffrey Cortland Jones in his third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Landscape Replica (Times Are Hard For Dreamers) features all new paintings from a series developed over the last year and a half. In these works, Jones continues to find inspiration from urban scenes and natural landscapes in creating his non-objective paintings, though the introduction of a new format reflects a refined relationship between artist and his practice.
Watch:
View a video tour of the exhibition
Jones takes notes from often overlooked moments of everyday life, such as the painted fields of buffed-out spray paint tags on buildings, or the build up of scuff marks on pavement and surfaces scraped by skateboards.
To the artist, these snapshots posses their own poetic structure that points to the visual language of abstract painting. Until recently, Jones has captured the essence of these physical yet subtle forms of mark making through intimately scaled paintings, nearly always in a vertical composition. In the new paintings on view, Jones pays homage to the cityscapes and landscapes that inspire him while utilizing a new format. He has scaled the work up and amplified the horizontal dimensions for paintings that allude to sweeping panoramic perspectives. In doing so, Jones’ recent paintings more directly address the lasting impression left on him by the vistas he comes across and allow a greater sense of physicality
Enamel on acrylic panel
12 x 36 in.
Exhibition Install Images:
A clear example of the physical process behind Jones’ work is found in Landscape Replica (Summer’s Stellar Gaze) (2021). Horizontal bands of scuff marks span the work’s lower third, made by riding a skateboard across the acrylic panel’s surface. Other works offer quieter fields of color on the surface, masking the built layers beneath and concealing the artist’s labor more readily. This is exemplified in Landscape Replica (So Soon, As If Summer Never Happened) (2021), comprised of soft blues and whites. The worked surface reads as ripples in a body of water extending to a long horizon line that bisects the work in half. Each work possess these elements of tranquility and aggression, a coexisting yin and yang that implores viewers to take a focused look.
This exhibition finds the artist with a renewed focus on a practice he has steadily maintained for a decade. While many of his materials and processes have remained consistent, Jones takes on new challenges in composition that compels even the most familiar to rediscover his work.
Jeffrey Cortland Jones is a painter, curator, and professor who lives in Southwestern Ohio. His work has been widely exhibited and has been written about in numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, Contemporary Art Review LA , Arts + Culture and New American Paintings, and featured in over 200 exhibitions since 2010. Solo exhibitions have been hosted in venues across the US and internationally, including Germany and Australia. He received a Master of Fine Art from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, both in Painting and Drawing. Jeffrey is a Professor of Art at the University of Dayton where he heads the Painting program. In addition to making work, Jeffrey also actively curates exhibitions at a number of galleries and alter- native spaces, including Divisible Projects, a project space he co-founded in 2014.