Jeffrey Jay Jarin
Published August 23, 2020
In Jeffery Jay Jarin's recent solo exhibition, Fake Happy, he presents a series of paintings around the idea of an imaginary "refuge" of bright pastel colored walls and indoor potted plants, including a semi-fictional account of the lockdown for context. Each are made up of clean and even color fields that suggest both modern art abstraction and the slick vector graphics of 1980s MTV or it's 2000s equivalent, Vaporwave. These fields are broken up occasionally by an accent, a motif, the sky, translucent applications of paint, or the organic lines of plants.
Plants are the most common, and like a few other lines, become signs of the artist's own precise and painterly drawing hand, a contrast to planes of color that can appear mechanically applied. These accents and effects help to create depth, transforming clinical abstractions into indoor spaces of artificial air, the kind that belongs to an office space or an elegant Reagan-era cocaine cowboy apartment.
Confetti-like detritus, pages of a diary, and plinths of a familiar color and shade are scattered and arranged throughout the gallery. They appear as fragments and components of the paintings, units that form the whole experience. The overall message is bliss, the artist coping with being trapped by a virus. Enter Patrick Bateman waxing poetic about Phil Collins' Sussudio. Jarin is a Filipino painter, working in the Philippines, who already had a number of acclaimed solo shows. Fake Happy is his fourth solo show for Blanc gallery. It ended on August 11, 2020. For information about his paintings, contact the artist or Blanc.
