"Facade" Original Oil On Canvas By Jean-Luc Almond

Oil on canvas.

46 x 46cm.

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.