Ryan Jones’s paintings refract our modernity through lenses of the past, recontextualizing archival imagery as a means of telling new stories about the present.
With references spanning film, advertising, and media across several decades, Jones’s fracturing and reassembling of the subject matter speaks both to the relentless passing of time and the perpetuation of cultural memory.
The work is cinematic, mysterious, and stylistically provocative with its use of composition and the embellishment of visuals from the worlds of film and advertising. Having originally begun his career as a painter of lifelike backdrops for film sets, Jones’s talent of painting for the silver screen finds echoes in his paintings’ luminous highlights and manipulated depth, while the framing of his tableaus evokes storyboards created for screenplays or scripts.
Jones’s signature use of a divided canvas allows for disparate scenes to accumulate towards a larger narrative, ultimately completed by the viewer’s own projections. What results is a colliding of past and present, charting the evolution of iconography and its many meanings within the endless expanse of history.
Click here for a selection of Selected Artworks
more information: caldwellsnyder.com
