Bliss

A solo by Jayson Cortez

One East Asia 10th Year Anniversary

September 8-11, 2020

Gallery 8
8 Duke Steet, St Jame’s
St James, London SW1Y 6BN
(Just across Christie’s Headquarters)

Artist’s Statement:

“Everyone is looking for happiness. After ten years’ experience as a full-time artist, this group of paintings is a visual representation of my deep joy. This state of bliss I experience runs from play through to freedom and knowledge. My storytelling leads the viewers into my personal world of satisfaction and pleasure.”

Two open rooms. Each with a female figure facing the light from the window where, like Vermeer’s blue-jacketed woman reading her letter, she buries herself in her interior world of text. Resilience and Bliss, the titles of the books in which she is ensconced respectively in Open Room I and Open Room II, speak for Jayson Cortez, who has stood firm in his ambition to be a full-time artist and found happiness in realising his dream. The books on the shelves double up as motifs – content – and as clues to what he calls “the library of my mind”: fashion, photography, anatomy, art history and art collecting have lit his path to knowledge as brightly as the out-of-frame daylight illuminates the room.

Simile aside, these two paintings are the closest to the artist’s explication of his emotional life-experience and are the most poignant of the seven large paintings and eight supporting studies that comprise the exhibition. This is Jayson Cortez’s first solo show in London and it is a celebration of the journey that brought him here.

Bliss is an autobiographical title, and the books in the Open Room paintings provide clues to the ideas that have driven his will to identity. The catalogues of paintings from the Louvre and the Vatican indicate the history of the Philippines as oncecolonised nation by revealing the axis of artistic exchange that eventually grew as a consequence of the Spanish occupation
in the early modern period; another history – that behind the postcolonial present of global artistic practices – is embodied in the Laurence King publication A World History of Art, or in the close placement of monographs of Ronald Ventura and Francis Bacon. Photography features heavily along with fashion and human anatomy, explaining Cortez’s obsession with the figure and how it is presented to public scrutiny and contextualised in social practices and through photography. Perhaps the book Rembrandt’s Journey is a hint of Cortez’s path to knowledge reified in his use of sepia tones that, in their painted mimesis of old, sepia-tinted photographs, perhaps discovered accidentally, call on the notion of memory. Memory exists in reference to image-making methodologies of the past and in the desaturation of colour that signifies the changing nature of the brain’s recall. Rembrandt’s glazed layers pigmented with bone black through earthy umbers and ochres to yellow and red lakes allow the pale ground layer to light his sitters’ faces from within as they emerge from their tenebristic gloom.

Cortez makes a much starker statement with his tonal play in the clarity of represented forms, but the language is shared. He acknowledges, through his palette, that images which are distinctively of the here and now have their roots in the past, but he also makes a post-modernistic nod to fracture and discontinuity in his conceptual and physical layering of motif and time.

A heavy dose of surrealism permeates the collection, realised through Cortez’s characteristic interplay of photorealistic images, which in their painted mimesis form the first layer of time presented like a puzzle for the viewer to solve. While time would appear to be the past, as already argued – since sepia-tinted photographs printed on paper are, as a tangible form, historic – a further question could be raised: is this apparently photographic mimesis of old technologies also a reference to the time-warp of the present digital age? After all, there are plenty of Apps and other types of software that allow images to appear aged in this way, and in the last decade digital monochrome cameras have been launched upon the market. Could this simply be a case of Karr’s “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”?

Also deconstructing the argument that Cortez is specifically referencing old photographs and mechanical photography as a technique is the fact that Cortez’s photorealism becomes less illusory and more self-referential as painting the closer one looks at them. The sfumato brushstrokes become visible, particularly in distant imagery, as can be seen in the trees in Play Ground. Photography itself is, in Charles Peirce’s semiotic terms, an index of a presence now absent (though, in the same terms, also a symbol and an icon), so a painting of a photograph is already at a double remove from the original “real” figure. Disruption and elusiveness of interpretation reigns.

In all the paintings we see sepia flowers and garlands weaving around the figures to occupy the same temporal space as the first layer of mimesis, as if they are part of the original sepia photograph that may or may not be indicated. High Vision and Wild Immersion work further to disrupt the temporal order by introducing grey scale background passages of photorealistic trees and flowers, leading to the potential abandonment of the notion that the sepia tones are the “oldest” part of the painting – which of course they never have been – because the black and white images could precede them. It’s all a play on the sense of time and memory. In two of the works, Play Ground and The Heart, more flowers as well as butterflies are overlaid in technicolour. These bend the notion of time by not belonging to the first layer and thus creating a second layer of mimesis, while also jabbing at art historical associations with the memento mori found in so many Netherlandish flower
paintings. Cortez celebrates life with the motif of flowers, but awareness of death is the most piquant state in which to appreciate being alive. The coloured flowers also draw attention to the surface of the painting, which is further emphasised by the third layer; this time it’s not mimesis but the abstract interruption of hard whiplash brushstrokes like ears of corn that cross every image, pulling the group together as signifiers of the present and the materiality of the painting as physical object. Thus, both time and material are foregrounded.

Through the disruptive nature of Cortez’s images, figuration, so much a part of the Philippines tradition, is up-ended. Figuration in the first instance tends to make images accessible, but Cortez’s humans quickly become elusive in the process of viewing. All of them, bar one, avert their gaze or have their faces hidden from view. They are not quite absent while present in the way that 19th century Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi’s turned-away figures appear to be; his people seem to embody withdrawal and alienation. Instead, Cortez’s figures are present but hidden as anonymous performers, as vehicles for the artist’s ideas. Yet if the eyes are the windows to the soul, then where can we find it? Only one figure meets the viewer’s gaze: the young woman in Free Spirit. We know she is smiling behind her bouquet. She may look like a bride but she may be free of that societal convention. Could her scarlet, tunnelling cloth, unlike the contingent details of a Renaissance Madonna’s cloth-of-state or a billowing curtain in a Baroque society portrait, speak only of the immutable soul and its path to rebirth, perhaps?

The figures as vehicles, anonymous, with no clear story to tell and defying time, do not claim to embody a real form. They become, like Plato’s Forms, not an imitation (art itself) of shadows (the observable world, in this case the photographic medium) that are twice removed from ‘truth’ (the intangible essence of being, which can only be reached through the mind), but idea. And this idea, for Cortez, is the phenomenon of existence. For him, existence is a state of joy, which is represented by the visual beauty of the flowers that bind the illusory figures in the suggested (but absent) sepia photographs. The coloured flowers are more present than the represented content but ultimately the abstract sweeping brushstrokes are more real than anything because they capture the act of painting and therefore of presence. The presence is Cortez’s own.

Viv Lawes
UK Senior Consultant to One East Asi