Jaybo Monk

 

Jaybo is an urban wanderer, a traveller that moves in the space of that unfinished metropolis, that is the world, among memories, fragments and traces abandoned in the urban landscape, that works like a theatre of the human joy and pain, studded with relationships that slide between first glances and deep emotions.

During this wandering, the painter meets the unexpected, what happens by chance, and is inspired by that accident that catches the eye and the brain, that incidental event, detail, word or shape that breaks in along the way and that he takes with him to the canvas.

Jaybo builds his poetics on these small accidents and unwanted mistakes that happen. He takes advantage of what happens at the wrong time, in the wrong place, his research in painting is about trying to be open to the unknown and to the accidental, without prejudices but with amazement and curiosity.

It is exactly this curiosity that makes Jaybo attracted to the unseen, from things left on the streets, to items forgotten around, to left-overs or something no one
notices anymore, things as lost as he is in himself, like a peculiar expression on a passerby’s face or a move of a stranger's body walking along the streets.

Inspiration can also come from a small detail that attracts the painter's attention flipping through the pages of an art magazine or a book about the great masters of art, from Bacon, to Modigliani and Leonardo. Everything that runs away from the standards or that remains lost in the cracks of a reality always more lived in fast forward sneaks into the painter's mind and comes together in his imaginative world.

 

Here is the basis of Jaybo's visual alphabet, a series of silent frames that tell forgotten stories, unveil secrets and memories lost in time along the way.
Jaybo's art is like a song made by images, it's a composition of feelings and suggestions, where the details that catch the artist's eye work like musical samples. All those inspiring fragments become part of a soundtrack played with brushes, following the tones of colors and the rhythm given by the strokes, with a canvas as the background.

That's the beauty of Jaybo's art, an unexpected chaotic harmony of beauty that takes shape in feminine bodies or animals, in faces and twisted legs, in smiles and grimaces. Once the canvas has accommodated everything, Jaybo breaks in with his hazardous brushstrokes, taking the risk of messing up the work and making mistakes, but at the same time this risk is a chance to let the unexpected happen and realize that an apparent mistake has turned into something beautiful. Then comes geometry, the archetype of the beauty of the world that first breaks the pictoric rhythm of the human body and then mingles itself with flesh and bones on the canvas.

- Serena Valietti

A short film about choices an artist makes when creating. By looking at the process of one of their works (by Rogier Postma).


contact us for a catalogue of available works by Jaybo Monk