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Norbert Lynton remarked on Jones‘ new work
“feels like an aboriginal hunter on a journey, of self discovery”
Sanford Wurmfeld
Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Professor of Fine Art
Hunter College, City University of New York
Approaching the blank canvas, sometimes as it’s on the floor, circling it, looking to picture ideas, Patrick Jones is no slave to external systems that for some artists impose themselves on their art. Rather he looks afresh for ideas - ideas that are pure color and form on the surface with no external relationship. For him it is a visual language from which arise pictorial events to be savored. Though intuitive and of the moment, his painterly decisions are informed by decades of experience. But these are choices open to all, as Jones investigates his own sensitivity for what any person might equally experience. And so we viewers must play along with the artist as he pushes and pulls colors into forms on the canvas everything open to change as he intensely studies the possibilities. Fixate on the whole and see the large-scale relationships as they form patterns and visual spaces or scan the details and feel the nuances of the picture. This is how the meaning of such work affects us: not through the precision of semantic reference, but through the ambiguity of pragmatic effect.
2 May 2007