Robert Sparrow Jones: The Uncertain Landscape

Jordan Faye Contemporary Presents: "The Uncertain Landscape," new paintings by Robert Sparrow Jones.

In Sparrow's work time is evident. Throughout "The Uncertain Landscape" he creates somber, melancholic, and yet expressive ebullience to old modes and traditions so that this body of work carries a deep emotive energy with stories that vacillate into memories.

"I am interested in narrative; storytelling through pictures evoking a deep sense of place. What moves me to make these works is the trifecta of memory, love, and the passage of time. The pictures serve as a shifting cross-section—using color, tone, and an expressive languor in paint language, to create a local dialect that, although uneven, I think vividly captures the energy, the mutability, or perhaps the stubborn persistence of what it’s like to be affected by place. They are meant to act in the present but suggest a past, moving with the rhythm of everyday life that is rife with multiple time signatures. The figures are intended to add atmosphere to past peregrinations and dalliances and knit the uncertainties of our life’s complications into such a lovely, changeable shifting. The emotional landscape emerges when our attentiveness to the sensual world brings a certain mutable responsiveness from the imperatives of consciousness."

—Robert Sparrow Jones