Gerdman Gallery is pleased to present Inez Jönsson's solo exhibition Protagonisterna.
Materials and symmetry are the anchors of Jönsson’s work. She builds her work as much as she paints it, preparing every element by hand. Colour goes on layer over layer, until it thickens into ridges and grain. The image is not applied on top; it emerges from the material and the structure. As such, the elements that usually support a painting become its protagonists.
In this new body of work materiality is pushed further, while strict symmetry loosens into the perception of it. The cross-like structure is not new to Jönsson’s practice, but the work now moves in a different direction. More of the attention falls on the balance between tilting and straight: lines kept precise, though never strictly perfect. She allows herself more freedom here, loosening some of her own rules of image and shape.
Removed from any religious reading, the cross is a form that comes out of the structure of the material itself. It reads more as a figure: dark, covering the whole surface, with a sense of motion.
In the larger paintings particularly, the surface works like a double exposure, the cross secretively hiding in the back, so that more than one image is held at once, oscillating between abstraction and figuration.
Much of the work happens before the paint. Jönsson sketches ahead to find a painting’s movement. The brushwork is more visible this time, pushed hard against the surface. The frames, too, come in for particular attention: each gives its painting a physical, object-like presence, holding it as a thing in the room rather than an image on the wall.
The palette stays close to the earth through a distinct range of darker shades. The works run from large to small, and the change in scale alters the purpose: the large paintings take on the room, the smaller ones are the most intimate. Up close, a painting separates into the frame, the drawn lines, and the colour built up over them.
