BEHIND THE SCENES:
ARTISTS IN THE STUDIO, JERSEY

Jason Butler, 2020, Jersey

Jason Butler Studio, New Paintings

Part I

I have been visiting artist Jason Butler in his Jersey studio for three years now. Watching his work evolve from a practice that was prone to elements of figuration into now a redolent and lush abstraction that is very much his own language. At the end of confinement, he sent me photographs of four major new works that were completed during this time when he was in the studio working, or with his family. A concentrated few months produced a very concentrated body of work; how much the state of the world affected him, we won’t know for some time. But we do see the rich and coherent vision Butler puts across these works, three diptychs and one monumental triptych.

Until travel stopped in March, I was planning to make a studio visit last spring, and speak to a group of collectors about his work. The event was postponed and in large part this new group of works is waiting to make a debut out of the studio; I will keep you posted! As they have such a pronounced life of their own, it is hard to imagine a time when Jason was going through the very hard work to get to this level of clarity. Our studio visits and subsequent conversations, over lunch in London, at openings in Paris, were about the nature of painting, great painting, Rembrandt, Duccio, Monet, understanding what it takes to make a work alive on the canvas, find the tension, let it breathe in its own way. I wanted you to see a photograph of his studio table mid-July, as we are having a protracted conversation about small paintings.

Today we talked again; he is spending early mornings in the studio with a cup of coffee and two thick books on Renaissance Painting. We discuss Cimabue, Giotto, now Fra Angelico’s Annunciation; this capacity to create invisible tension between a winged Angel and Mary. Formal emptiness becomes a vortex for spirit and spatial clarity. Butler’s paintings speak in this same vein, colors compressed, movement suspended in time.

Part II

One of the first things you notice in a studio full of paintings by Jason Butler is the fleeting nature of his complex abstract fields; his interest in a highly constructed world. For some time Butler has been selecting fragments of color which all suggest the same sense of meditative regard. We don’t know much about these shapes, clusters and veils that have somehow materialized together across a large surface. There is a quality of color and liquid pools, sanded surfaces, stratified onto a canvas from above, as if you are looking in puddles reflecting sky; at the same time you feel a velocity of forms pushing forward from deep space. The picture plane that interests Butler most is a compressed zone in-between. This is his sweet spot. These are a trope for something we can’t connect to, but sense directly. They are authentic in unsuspecting ways these intimate small patches, globs, smears, traces all vying for space.

Brush strokes, sanded patches of color on color, layer on layer create a surface tension that plays with historical painting concerns. Glazes reveal delicate fluid pours, pigment left to its own devices, built up surfaces are rough and tumble, hearty propositions. They are loud, demonstrative and tremendously present, appearing to be caught up by something we can’t fully observe; so we have to read non-body language in this mixed up abstraction – the turn of a striated episode melts into a background color and then jumps out again, pink on pink swishes as it swings into the foreground, moving slightly just out of the way of dark blue. Why the sudden side-step, the jumble of colors makes this clear.

Part III

Unsettling. Here abstract painting is used to define another locus and it both masks and covers any direct reference to a world outside the painting itself. The artist challenges us to define the subject more exactly. His masterful color field painting, this abstraction that drips and abuts one scratched pattern next to a pool of mauve or splotchy pale blue; Butler’s palette is both contemporary and somewhat out of time. He uses blacks and greys like a sculptor to create furrows and gullies in this imaginary world where we don’t quite know whether we are standing inside the fiction or outside.

There is a polarity at the core of this work and you ask yourself is he masking his desire to settle himself with his random subjects or is he a painter being torn away from his pleasure by scents that haunt him. Both are true. This current body of work includes areas of colors fused into overlapping pools, ochre yellow, kitchen pink, muted turquoise, blue black develop a speed and appetite for the eye. These works are strident and without hesitation create an agitated surface tension; masterful.

Looking at these works you ask yourself why paint in any other way? Here is the music, the deep play of tone and volume. Here is the virtuosity of an artist who has a physical hunger for paint that is unbound. If we simply study these paintings in spatial terms Butler pulls deep space abruptly into the foreground utterly confounding our sense of perspective. The foreground as a screen or curtain that is there between the viewer and the space behind — something is happening we are not clearly supposed to see. Where we bathe in his sense of secrecy and voyeurism as theatrical as any film we might imagine.

Part IV

Butler plays with the nature of privacy and inner reflection; we are given a glimpse of something emerging from the middle distance but it is not at all clear what we are meant to see or understand. Abstract fragments and gestures again — vestiges of what? The surface is so rich we try to see them as more than mere formal language could it be a memory, a torn piece of reality, a visual recollection – these slips of color, thick and thin hover in some other dimension between deep space, we now see opening out behind them. The veil we have been looking through is something he suspends in the foreground to build this tension. You might argue these works are more complex and emotional because of this distended spatial construction he works out so carefully.

Or you could argue that his bold authentic voice compresses these many layers, blotting out the notion of representation completely, whatever they are in the phantasmagoria of the artist’s unconscious. The power of a closed three-dimensional space in his paintings is palpable. We are not looking at romantic abstraction we are seeing the sheer power and will of fine painting where the content is caught in the gestures and placement of colors against line. It is in these paintings we see what a very unique painter Jason Butler can be, with the practice of surface texture and light that appears to be both reflecting from the works frontal planes at the same time passing from some space behind to infuse the clusters and shimmering fields with a splendid illuminated vibration.

All works and photographs by Jason Butler