Jean-Pierre Roy
Region: Northeast
Carl Sagan once said, “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.” Paint is the shortest pathway to the manifestation of my imagination, and the “worlds that never were” are the places that I go in order to more deeply know the only world that is - ours: here and now.
My paintings are the result of a life spent wanting to know what forces make up the cosmos. They are totems to the sublime nature of change, and pictoral meditations meant to slow our passage through the 4th dimension. It is the search for a balance of opposing forces – atomic cohesion vs. repulsion, the manufactured vs. natural systems of organization, precision vs. abstraction, hard vs. soft, and broken vs. whole – that drives my desire to discover the divine systems of the universe.
While acknowledging their cinematic escapist influences, my dystopian constructions of a new American Mythology join a more psychological tradition of apocolyptic self-exploration and spectacle. Jack Goldstein, Cormac McCarthy, and Chris Maker would recognize this imaginary future, where cities dream about when they were once whole – a “Romantic Landscape,” born of a post-Hollywood age.