There are painters who express their observation of reality through so called representation. There are painters who express their feelings and or attitude toward reality through abstracting its literal form. There are those who combine these approaches.
What is perhaps most arresting about James Juett’s work is the multifarious mischief with which he represents through abstraction and abstracts through representation. The sleight of hand with which he aggrandizes the familiar and captures the mysterious.
Not simply flirting with the slippery perimeter between realism and impression, he actually weaves a complex, ironic and yet never cynical phantasmagoria of the world as we experience it. Mr. Juett employs an ever morphing panoply of distant memories, punctuated by familiar objects. He reexamines and reinvents as if by dipping and stretching his carefully chosen elements through a mire of social, sexual and psychological contexts as if to reveal their hidden personalities and alter egos.
To enter a Nicholas Juett painting is to relinquish willingly, one\’s childish dependency on the illusion of superficial logic and the visual language it uses to subdue us.
Nicholas Klein
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My work is subjective, using the capacity of paint to make fictions out of reality, and echo how it feels to be human. The paintings in this show are not intended as a clear-cut narrative. Contradiction is a facet of real life, and the subjective realm is my interest.
In terms of the painterly side of this body of work, the speed of the brush in horizontal and vertical movements under which things settle define my technique and style. It is you the viewer who scans the surface of my painting and seeks images that trail, find things at first unnoticed, and experience intimacy vis-a-vis the painter.
Drawings play a large part in my process. My ideas for a work are drawn directly from contemporary experience. However, the final work relies on an intimacy found in my early drawings. Something remarkably beautiful and frozen exists in these early portrait drawings (1978-1982.)
My more recent drawings (1995-1997) play a large part in contributing to the understanding of subjects to be painted. The juxtaposition of art & nature, versus product & capitalism is a recurrent theme in my work. The life of my subject is captured in the media of charcoal, watercolour, ink, or soft pastel. There is also a validity in leaving a drawing as a final art form and not pursuing it any further in paint.
The painting, TV Guide, 1998 is inspired by the well-known BBC children’s show called Blue Peter. A sequence of stills each one isolated in the studio space, share with us a loneliness felt for past twentieth century moments. The additions of painted god like figures onto the ceiling suggest a high water mark in culture in the television medium. Looking into the interior a Dodo and the cameraperson are as if suspended in time, because they are history.
In Race Into Space, 1999 a nude sunbather on the shingle, sympathetically painted dominates a seascape at the seaside in Brighton, England. Seen in a relaxed state she is at ease with her oblivion to events that surround her.
A series of events depicted in finite detail refer to the attempts of mankind to defy gravity and strive for the sun or the moon. Escape is the essence of this painting, Icarus and the Apollo landing vehicle defy an otherwise mundane existence at the beach.
What Icarus strove for, twentieth century man conceivably achieved. The paradox is that those in a state of complacency on the beach obtain a certain escape of their own without resorting to flight.
In the painting Polo Mint, 1999 an aerial view of the US capital, Washington DC has slashed across it the power and excess of a luxury car, created from a hybrid of a Mercedes Benz and a Rolls Royce. The interior figures are either asleep or dead or resting. In their oblivion our own perception of the might and power that drive an economy is heightened because we see what they do not. From our observation point we see the grand plan and layout of this capital’s buildings and a large nut and bolt, symbolic of an industrial force which puts the fruits of capitalism at the disposal of the consumer (now asleep or dead or resting.)
The painting Ever-Ready, 1999 touches on my first hand experience in Croatia one year ago. Life force in nature can be compared with volts in a transistor battery or the wind caught in sail ships. The lighthouse (seen in Zadar) is an independent beacon and all these things defy uselessness so long as they harness power of some kind.
Like all other things with power nature will simply dissolve – all energy is transitory. Just as a human body is an island, the head I have shown is isolated in decay surrounded by water and sky. If the body is the physical island then the head is the capital and idea of nationhood. Organic in nature I have created passages of pure pigment that disperse in contrast to clearly depicted still life, the legacy of manmade culture. A set of phenomena is here painted and left for a future era’s reflection.
It is in the company of others where escape from everyday life is caught. Hagen-Daz, 1998 is a painting, see based upon my own-sketched observation of the London Covent Garden Opera House. I refer to an existence of consumption and decadence as well as a brooding dark side.
As in the other paintings we the viewer experience the reality and share in a fantasy. By singling out a man in battle-fatigue-design we the audience encounter his lone self in the comfort of the silent majority. His illusion of a giant blue boy, on stage, enters our psyche.
Fairy Liquid, 1998. A sleeping head dreams in a relaxed state encircled by a cardboard box space that floats in front of sea copied from a French table salt container. Made large is a running baby copied from an English washing up liquid container. Liquorices Allsorts ready for consumption lie next to a head. Two nudes sit peacefully engrossed in their own reality despite the overall unease of violence that has been done and will be done, and the Fairy Liquid baby makes its fast exit left.
Mars A Day, 1999. The key component in this work is the destructive organization of space to enable a variety of visual resources and images to co-exist on the River Thames, London. Like other paintings, my work has us witness a human moment frozen in time, surrounded by events we interpret as their defining future. The demure boy and warring masculine rugby players and an old war ship (the past and future) define the child’s future inheritance. Their relationship to one another is cyclical. The title of this painting is derived from the energy supplying chocolate bar “A Mars a day helps you work rest and play.”
Drawings 1978-1997 Revisited
My drawings explore the inner and outer world as a likeness to our being. Romantic Male Boozer, 1995. Leaning into a constructed bar frame two men locate their inward existence in unison. Nature is all about them while their own is lost, even to one another.
Wheel of Consumption, 1995. Rise and fall of purchasing power is nothing new. The possibility of comfort is a drive that is known to be a gamble, thus figures jump into the air at the same time taking their chance in the game. Chance dictates who lands on the ground first, yet there is no ground shown in my drawing. There is no realistic ground in desire. A number of drawings were made in advance of the painting Fairy Liquid, the first work in the painted series titled Paintings 1998-1999 Forever. It is in the mind\’s eye where images and ideas cross fertilize one another and are associative. To draw them on paper shows me a glimpse of myself.
Fixing A Hole (series I, II, III, IV, V,) 1997. Central to this drawing series is the illusion of a hole. A pencil sketch of a hole ripped into a cardboard box became my model. Surrounding the centrally located hole that I copied, in subsequent drawings I added early portrait studies. (These, like so many of my recent paintings, came from early portraits in which a moment was already captured.) The hole symbolized to me the transitory boundaries of depth and surface experienced when we are in the land of dreams.
Perhaps these sweet dreams, whatever they are, will eventually suffocate the sleepers. The addition of confectionery with a masked baby-like head, that wishes to speak, were placed into that hole. There is a tyranny that exists in these drawings: a baby-like innocence and yet my adults are trapped in sleep by fears. These themes became the subject of a painting.
James N. Juett
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James Juett was born 1963 in Cambridge, England.
1982 Cambridge College of Arts & Technology, Cambridge, UK Certificate in Sculpture from William MorrisÕ Foundation School of Art & Design
1986 University of Reading, Reading, UK B.A. Honors Degree (2:1), Painting
1988 School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA Rotary Scholar / Post Baccalaureate Graduate Studio Certificate
1992 School of the Art Institute of Chicago / NYC Studio Program, Chicago & New York, USA, M.F.A., Painting
Exhibits since 1982.
