Jean-Pierre Roy: zeroHour
Friday, March 24th thru Saturday, April 21st 2006
Opening Reception: Friday March 24th, 6-9 pm
Linda Warren Gallery is proud to present zeroHour, Jean-Pierre Roy’s newest body of work where he furthers his exploration of the phantasmagoric landscape. The panoramic format of these carefully crafted oils on panel, evoke the language of both cinema, wide angle and aerial photography and serve well as the gateway into Roy’s vivid imaginary world of epic vistas transgressed by unsettling anomalies and traces of human activity. His majestic waterfalls, dramatic gorges and ancient mountains recall the high romance of the Hudson River School and their pursuit of the divine in nature, while simultaneously engaging the Earth Works artist’s notions of Entropy and The New Monumentality. The bird’s eye perspective offers the audience a poetic detachment from which to access and contemplate the larger meaning of the impending or foretold doom down below. Like a religious icon painting, the images create a meditative pictoral perspective which addresses our heightened sense of anxiety toward the environment today and suggests the exhausted aftermath of our struggles with it.
What the viewer will find strangely absent from Roy’s purposely ambiguous narratives and seemingly post apocalyptic world is the human life form itself. The incandescent glow of lights or the orange dot of a weather balloon serves as a surrogate for the human presence. The man-made structures diminutively depicted within, and implied from without, insure their once, or continued, presence. It appears that living life at best in these locales, is living life on the edge. Were these cities purposely built on the precipice of potential catastrophe, or are these cities hanging on in the aftermath of disaster? Their sci-fi sensibility bode beautifully as metaphors for the ultra-topical issues that we face post-Katrina and the many other calamities that inflict our times. Passion, spirit, bombastic stupidity, ego, fear, refuge, self-preservation, annihilation, dominance, submission, control and the lack thereof are all to be pondered in zeroHours’ sublime, theatrical terrain.
Jean-Pierre Roy’s background and experience as a Concept Designer, Art Director and Matte Painter for numerous special effects, video game and film production companies, including DreamWorks, Universal, Electronic Arts, Universal and Paramount Studios has clearly influenced his work. He received a BFA from Loyola Marymount University and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2002. Currently residing in New York City, Roy teaches painting at Parsons the New School of Art and Design. This will mark his first solo exhibition at Linda Warren Gallery.