On view under “bio” at Jasonredwood.com
Jason Redwood conjures a hallucinatory hyper-color world that seems to have astrally projected from the universe’s Akashic Records and into an unknown collective conscience. With a background in design and digital illustration, Redwood’s aesthetic embodies a hard-edge pop sensibility that straddles the realms of the unreal. Drawing from childhood memories, advertising, television, remnants of conversations and dreams, Redwood’s work simultaneously conflates and collapses, only to emerge, as if by spell craft, into a double-headed dragon breathing fires forged from Redwood’s mindscape.
Redwood’s creative process riffs off the free-spirited nature of automatist practices, allowing the mind to unlock, reveal itself, and manifest itself in paint allowed to organically come into being. Rather than laying out a rigid architectural structure, creating drafts or sketches for works, Redwood instead begins by experimenting, using various mediums on canvas, paper and panel, building colors, textures, and forms. There is a surprising openness towards the work, allowing it to flow in the direction the piece itself dictates. Eventually, like a wizard peering into a murky cauldron of swirling forms, figurative elements and compositional organization come together like prophesies at the completion of the piece. Not unlike free-form jazz, Redwood breaks down conventional compositional structures, instead returning artistic creation to a primordial space that allows room for improvisation, visions, energy and beyond.
It is fitting that often, part and parcel of Redwood’s creative process is listening to music—within the works there is an overarching musicality, synthetic rhythms pulse with pigment, layers of paint interlace like psychedelic riffs, motifs appear and recede like rousing choruses. In this respect, the works call to mind a kind of synesthesia-induced perception, using color to “compose” his works. In this sense, Redwood’s work evidences a certain spiritual, almost theosophical tendency. Yet within our contemporary post-post-modern cultural landscape, Redwood’s indefinable totems appear more as a critique of the loss of authenticity in our current world smattered with cheap simulacra false idols.
Overarchingly, there is a shamanistic characteristic to the works—stroboscopically flitting in and out of existence. Not unlike the visions induced by a Dream machine’s pulsating lights, there is an oscillation and vibration in the use of saturated colors whose flickerings might even induce seizures– though in some kind of transcendent, ecstatic way of course.
Redwood’s works are veritable feasts of fancy—intensely seductive works that, if allowed to break on through to the other side and become living, breathing beings of light, might just lead legions of young hopefuls past the apocalypse and onto the 13th floor, where pigment exists as pure energy, artists are prophets, and paintings open the doors of perception.