Jean-Luc Almond - Beautiful Chaos - Online Exhibition: April 2024

  • This month we are excited to present our first ever online exhibition featuring the incredible Jean-Luc Almond. We’ve put together a stunning collection of 18 originals for you to explore online. Plus, we've arranged a carefully curated display in our gallery, open for viewing until the end of April. It's going to be fantastic!

     

    Click Here to View 'Beautiful Chaos' Online

     

    For all enquires...
     
    Send us an email: Info@arkleyfineart.co.uk
    Give us a call: 07860478095
    Visit us: Arkley Fine Art, 16/17 Hermitage Road, Hitchin, Hertfordshire, SG5 1BT
  • Biography

    Biography

    Jean-Luc’s highly textured oil paintings have a tangible, sculptural quality. Embracing the transformations that occur when not enslaved to the subject matter, he becomes obsessed with the materiality and texture of the paint itself. A tension forms within the thick surfaces as paint takes precedence over representation, and a deeper psychological and emotional presence is unearthed. He meticulously constructs a portrait using multiple layers of oil before masking, erasing, and blurring features through bold impasto marks, scratching, and peeling. Traces of its history are exposed – an apparition or fading memory of what’s beneath. Jean-Luc’s Dark Head paintings play with light and darkness. Ambiguous subjects emerge from – or disappear into – the shadows, hints of concealed features are illuminated, and the viewer is enticed to search deeper.

    Jean-Luc’s influences include Victorian photography, death masks, and black and white film: historic sources presenting timeless or haunting qualities. These pixelated references lend themselves to reinvention of their lost colours and textures, reimagined in his paintings as ephemeral moments of beautiful chaos. Polarities coexist in tension – forming and breaking; creation and destruction; representation and abstraction – as the subjects teeter on the brink of disappearance, reflecting human experience itself: fractured, disjointed, and deeply layered.

  • Words from Jean-Luc Almond, Find out more behind 'Beautiful Chaos'

    Words from Jean-Luc Almond

    Find out more behind 'Beautiful Chaos'
    "I’m interested in treating paint like a new skin. Combined with my fascination with texture it can transform a subject and bring a new life to an image. It is like reimagining the lost colours and textures not obtainable from the archival images I work from. I love the visceral and tangible effects that can be created through oil and I constantly try to push the boundaries of it. The paint often surprises me. Textures can disrupt the features completely and other times it is more subtle. I use a combination of tools such as scrapers, trowels, and squeegees and sometimes throw the paint. The accidental marks can be equally emotive as the planned.The subjects are sometimes familiar and other times not, (Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Taylor in the large works). I’m interested in ambiguity and what is hidden is equally as appealing to me as what is revealed. I like the idea of polarities such as chaos and order, beauty and brokenness, figurative and abstract and darkness and light. A painting resonates most with me when it contains these elements and triggers emotions not seen just in the external appearance and the paintings often feel in a state of flux, like life itself. "