Jonas Ranson: Corrida Humainé

About

Westland Place Gallery is pleased to present a new body of print works by Jonas Ranson. Achieved through treatment in both digital conversion and CMYK colour separation silkscreen technique, pieces consist of large printed 'panels', visually complex and cartographic in form. Taken from disparate yet analogous influences, works attempt to coalesce in an allusion to invented cultural interpretations of good and evil, heaven and hell, salvation and damnation. Situated between luxurious refinement and divested replication, Ranson adopts the associations of design to comment on themes of man's self-destructive behaviours that outwardly reflect an inner dysfunction. Using this blueprint as a departure point for printerly invention, the works excavate the intrinsic beauty from the abject and grotesque disclosing compulsive beauty in the hollow and salacious and entwine the personal and symbolic into fragile mythologies. Ranson's tableaus confuse the intimate and the monumental, creating an exotic blend of kitsch innocence and hyper-real sophistication. The consuming process and encyclopaedic references used in the work mirror the free flowing expanses of imagination. All is rendered with a focussed obsession and forms a range from the poetically detailed to the violently scatological. These mosaic-like motifs offer geometrically pure terrains which engage with ideas of the exotic and synthetic. Following the dictates of the underlying patterns in the work, Ranson departs from the depictive 'reality' of a portrait, of a landscape, a still life, to create abstractions that incorporate digital effects designed for the purpose of interruption, and to readily confuse the reality and imaginary expanse and the tangible veritas of the picture plane. Jonas Ranson is an international London based artist specialising in print and a graduate of the Royal College of Art (2003).