Darren John @BOXPARK

About

Coinciding with his upcoming 'Parallel' exhibition at Upstairs Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, artist Darren John will be simultaneously exhibiting 4 new large temporary works at Boxpark, East London from Thursday 1st September - Wednesday 5th October. 

The works, produced live over 4 single sittings at Boxpark, are part of John's 'Parallel' series that explores the value of the untamed creative spirit and the centrality of this mind set in artistic expression. These new paintings take advantage of the immediate nature of Aerosol Paint and aim to celebrate creativity and the liberated imagination through a "first-time" approach, nodding towards a notion of the mind and hand acting as a single entity. 

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Darren John’s primary concern as an artist is the value of creative imagination and it’s suppression in everyday life. There is a sense of awe and wonder innate to childhood that persists in life despite a tendency for this spirit to be curtailed in adulthood. For the child that has not learnt where the boundaries are supposed to lie, the imagination remains limitless. John’s project is to make tangible that sense of unchained creative freedom.

John’s recent work takes the imagination itself as subject. These are not paintings of places or events, rather the canvas operates as a window into the mind of the painter. Cryptic and imposing yet playful, John’s visual language channels the mind set of creativity in all its spontaneity. His iconography and abstract forms collide and coexist without explanation like impulsive thoughts in the psyche. A roguish sense of enigma pervades in the work that reflects the endless complexities of thought in the free imagination. As viewers, we are invited to decipher this aura of mystery and in doing so we must engage with the artist’s vision on its own terms. At this point, we too have left our dimension behind and have arrived in a parallel realm of our own unbound creative imagination.

http://www.iamdarrenjohn.com