The Peripheral Path: Paintings By Jean-Pierre Roy
Talk with Jean-Pierre Roy for long enough and you begin to get the sense that, with the right amount of imaginative discernment, the boundaries between what many perceive to be high and low art are frequently not boundaries at all, but rather intricate, furtive passageways. Look closely enough and you’ll see how the seeds of one genre were brought to harvest in another, however antithetical the two might first appear. Artistic vision is like a bloodline, above all desirous of being carried on. In fact, there is in one particular case a long, unbroken genealogy of artistic style that snaked its way through European art history and American landscape painting before emerging disguised in a medium in which it is all but indistinguishable. “The epic landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt and Caspar David Friedrich anticipated the imagery of mid-twentieth century cinema, seventy-five years before Hollywood existed,” Roy says. “The first time I saw those guys’ paintings I realized that I had been seeing their influence trickling up through film history.”
It’s an intellectually bold—even extravagant—theory. The kind of sweeping yet specific insight that perks you up and piques your curiosity as to exactly what type of kaleidoscopic prism Roy is using to see the world. He even adduces a concrete example—the matte paintings for the Genesis Cave from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn—that exquisitely illustrates this “cross-pollination” of canvas and camera; Romantic landscape painting and science fiction; “high” and “low.” It is through his detailed knowledge of not only art history in general, but its transatlantic leaps and clandestine medium shifts (the way certain artistic impulses vanish and resurface and bob and weave through media) that he is able to discern how the Hudson River School painters found a home in the film industry. He describes the Hudson River school as “that discipline of invented landscape painting [that] was left by the wayside for the most part in American art because of advances in modernism and the encroaching of other dialogues in the art world in the early-twentieth century.”
According to Roy, Hollywood “in the teens and ‘20s and ‘30s were populated with artists that came out of fourth generation Hudson River School realists. It was kind of a secret pocket—a place where a certain kind of pre-20th century art dialogue could continue in hiding.” Roy makes a striking point: Church’s breathtaking, verdant landscapes, where elemental forces shine and burn and surge and melt with blazing intensity, give perfect form to the cinematic long before the word cinéma first appeared in French in 1899. Roy is also comfortable traversing the decades of descendancy between that early reemergence of the Hudson River School in the ‘30s to their reverberations in more modern films like Wrath of Kahn.
…I started to see parallels between this kind of high art, historical influences and how they were running alongside a lot of these low art genre influences
…gallery culture was non-existent compared to the way it is now. The only industry [in L.A.] that seemed to embrace artistic talent and drawing as an articulate discourse was the film industry.”
Roy grew up in Venice and Santa Monica, CA. His mother was a nurse and his father an air-conditioning contractor. He describes himself as a “beach kid” who was mostly free of the influences of that iconic white sign on Mount Lee—that is, until he began working on makeup effects as a teenager for Stan Winston Studio. He worked on landmark ‘90s blockbusters Terminator 2, Batman Returns,
and Jurassic Park, experiences that further endeared film and its level of accessibility as an art form to him. Growing up in L.A. in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, “there were one or two museums, and gallery culture was non-existent compared to the way it is now. The only industry [in L.A.] that seemed to embrace artistic talent and drawing as an articulate discourse was the film industry.”
Roy worked in Hollywood for close to ten years before he decided to take his own career as an artist seriously. Around 2000 he moved to New York City and attended the New York Academy of Art. After receiving his MFA in 2002, group shows in New York galleries like DFN and Linda Warren followed, and he would get his first solo exhibition, Homecomings, in 2005. But before all that, Roy would need to travel to Florence to round out the far-flung amalgamation of influences that inform his work. While getting his undergraduate degree in film and studio arts at Loyola Marymount in L.A., Roy did a semester abroad at Studio Arts Center International (SACI) in Florence. Roy’s time at SACI helped pull the worlds of European art and American filmmaking closer together. “It started to connect some of the technical disciplines but also some of the narrative threads that I was really drawn to in the genre of filmmaking that I was interested in. I started to see those narrative threads showing up in European art history, starting from the Romantic landscape painters of Northern Europe through to the Southern Renaissance painters and beyond. That experience in Florence revealed to me the narratives that I was interested in weren’t just self-invented in the twentieth century in film.”
Homecomings, shown in 2005 at DFN Gallery in New York City, was a kind of single long aerial shot of a mountainous, snow-blasted future, bleakly punctuated with sparse cityscapes that may or may not be inhabited. The oil-on-panel works are not so much post-apocalyptic as they are post-human, hushed, deceptively idyllic visions of exotic new climates that show no trace of the squalor and upheaval that typically accompany mankind in the speculative future. A solo exhibition in 2006, Soletta, saw him take on more agile textures, a richer palette, and more palpable, fully realized subject matter: Power plants crumble into the earth; buildings are rent to rubble under nocturnal conflagrations; bright toxic fumes spread through cities like neon swaths of sarin gas. Soletta was the earth as war zone, every inch metastasized by artillery fire, explosions, the white-smoke arc of missiles and the reptilian lurk of chemical agents. Perhaps even more riveting was the assortment of influences that stirred just beneath the surface. In one painting the sublime cataclysms of Romanticist John Martin, in another the terrifying future prophesied in Terminator 2. In these works Roy was beginning to conjure the imagery and visual repertory from which he would draw for years to come.
“I grew up with film, video games, and comic books as the primary source of my visual memory. While some of them have stood the test of time and have been considered classics of the genre or the medium, a lot of it was really just capital L Low art. It wasn’t until I started taking my education seriously, studying in Florence and going to graduate school here in New York that I started to see parallels between this kind of high art, historical influences
and how they were running alongside a lot of these low art genre influences.
It was Roy’s work in Landmarks and some of the stuff shortly thereafter in which the artist really announced himself and his talent. Pieces like “Dream of Parted Steel” and “We Make Our Own Meridian” were not only more technically proficient than earlier works, with carefully balanced compositions and a superior knack for manipulating the viewer’s eye. They also began to climb out of the melting pot of Roy’s “visual memory” and stake out their own strange aesthetic territory, one with similarly portentous trappings, but with a new, hyper-industrialized rendering of traditional landscape painting. Roy’s work suggested how technological progress and the exponentiality of urban infrastructure were reshaping the surface of the earth and remapping the human mind. The work was getting more cerebral, more existential. This was metaphysical sci-fi.
Throughout his growth as an artist, Roy remains exceptionally able to reconcile European art history with American cinema. In his artist statement for 2014’s solo exhibition in Copenhagen, The New Me Is Already Old, Roy explains that he is interested in how, “within these cinematic and genre influences like fantasy, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic stuff, there were these stories or desires to wanna explore the human condition that were very similar to, if not exactly the same as stuff that fine artists have been dealing with in Western art for hundreds, if not thousands of years.” But despite the inevitable common thread or two, The New Me Is Already Old actually represents the continuation of a significant shift for Roy that began with the pseudo-self-portraits he started showing in 2011 and that were featured in 2012’s Terraformer.
I’d read somewhere that Francisco Goya’s “The Colossus” paintings had influenced some of Roy’s more recent work, and wanted to ask him if the invocation was accurate. I did and didn’t get the chance. Roy’s expansive speaking style does not anticipate future questions as much as it renders them obsolete; his answers take a sort of elliptical orbit around a question, covering tangentially related subjects before returning to the territory initially inquired-upon. In just such a way he touches on Goya. “That colossus figure that shows up in all of those pieces started as a callback to Goya’s ‘The Colossus.’”
my senses are telling me one thing, culture is telling me something different, and investigations into the nature of reality are telling me a third thing.”
“He was using that colossus figure as a symbol for the kind of terror of the unknown and the seemingly infinite gulf of the abyss on the other side of the horizon. [The paintings] were being done by an artist who’d seen a lot of violence and a lot of political and social upheaval, [including] the French invasion of Spain. The scariest thing we could imagine was the authority figure rolling through the landscape and upheaving the lives of the powerless. I wanted to re-appropriate that colossus figure for a very contemporary set of anxieties. My inclusion of this giant dystopian figure started off really less as a symbol for the terror of the unknown and of violent upheaval and really more as a kind of [expression of] the impotence of the attempt to reconcile the conflict between the world that we’re building and the world that we’re destroying.” Perhaps the best way to read Roy’s appropriation of Goya is by looking at “The Colossus” alongside it’s dejected
counterpart, “The Giant.” The former exhibits awe-inspiring power, menace, implacability; the latter profound inner disturbance, his face twisted by its own silhouette, his mind collapsing under the weight of its own omnipotence. Roy is fascinated by a modernized version of that same paradox: Humans have an incredible capacity to reshape the world through technological progress, but is that brilliance and ingenuity transforming us, making us go blind to the ramifications of such a creative destruction?
Works from The New Me Is Already Old like “The Pasture” and “Scope for All Directions” have an immediate aesthetic appeal—subjects are painted in sharp, bright hues and possess an organic, almost primitive dynamism. But deeper intrigue lies in their philosophical underpinnings. These are men with polyhedrons, faceless busts, and mirror shards for faces. (Roy informs me that the geometric shape coming out of the head of the subject in “The Pasture” is an amplituhedron, a multidimensional structure used in quantum physics.) Despite (or because of) our daily sensory overloads, we are no longer able to access an objective world unfiltered by technological and scientific advancement and the ideologies and dogmas that build themselves around those advancements. As Roy puts it in his artist statement, “there is a way of cutting off the figures’ access to the world—to me that was the flipping point, it is a mask and you cannot see the face, but more importantly none of the figures can see out.”
Actually, it’s even more complicated than that. At this particular stage in his career, Roy is fascinated with the fragmentary nature of perception, its limitations and its longings. “There’s the world that I’m presented with through my senses, and then there are these expectations about what the larger world holds in terms of a metaphysical narrative that [is] presented to you as you develop and as you grow up… And then there’s the world that’s actually there, and the three of them sometimes overlap but oftentimes have nothing to do with each other. That series of paintings [The New Me Is Already Old] was an attempt to autobiographically make peace with the fact that my senses are telling me one thing, culture is telling me something different, and investigations into the nature of reality are telling me a third thing.” Cognition, neuropsychology, epistemology—it’s a far cry from the halcyon days of drawing inspiration from summer blockbusters and the kitschy glow of American cinema, but if Roy and his work convince you of anything, it’s that highbrow and lowbrow, science and art, perception and reality all have a point of connection, if only you can find it.
His most recent pieces and the lines of thinking that are currently preoccupying him are further explorations of perception, but also seem to aspire toward a sort of unified theory of science, art, and quantum reality. “Democritus After Giordano,” for example, refers to the Ancient Greek philosopher credited with formulating the atomic theory, and the seventeenth-century artist who painted a famous portrait of him. In “Democritus After Giordano,” Democritus’s holographic head is what Roy would call “non-spatiotemporal”—an object outside of space and time. It’s a fitting substance for a painting whose title specifically places a subject’s existence two millennia after his death. Mystifying as it may seem, it’s surprisingly appropriate for an artist enthralled by tearing down seemingly fixed boundaries, or in some cases peering straight through them.*
This article first appeared as the cover feature in Hi-Fructose Issue 37, which is long sold out. Like what we do? Get our latest issue as part of a new subscription to our print magazine here. Thanks!
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