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Artist Statement

Commentary

Paintings are touchstones, a myriad of paint strokes, each with their own specific gravity, valence, and charge. From this magical contact, from this continual return, an image emerges, as if rising from the surface like a mirage. This simple miracle of the painter's art, of the material passing into the phenomenal, like the body transfigured into spirit, is at the heart of John Kingerlee's work.

Kingerlee creates intimately, all the better to lose ourselves in his painted worlds without the burden of grandiosity of size or gesture. This is not to say that this work eschews drama, for it engages in its own potent theatrics of loss, memory, and the possibility of their reclamation in the experience of the present moment. But it does so at a scale that can be held in two hands, like reading an ancient scroll. We sense in this work the enduring, immemorial persistence of rocks and walls, and of the spirit, at once human and transcendent, that inhabits them. Kingerlee's paintings are literally in touch with their subjects, simultaneously tactile and visual. The intimacy of this work leaves no space between artist and subject, viewer and the experience of seeing.

Kingerlee paints in a number of modes, including figurative works, landscapes, and grids, that despite their singularity have a commonality of feeling. The figurative works include collages, heads, and poetic composite images. The collages incorporate everyday detritus such as postage stamps and transit tickets, and especially meaningful things like pages of the Trollope novel, Rachel Ray, that the artist's father read to him as a child. These collages, often with drawn or painted figures feel like diaries that have been composed extemporaneously, as past and present layer and collide. The heads appear as ravaged but human, almost phantoms but still of this world, elemental as if made from light and stone. Both blasting sunlight and the rocky earth are the prime elements of the landscapes, raw, wind-blown, buoyant images that refuse to stay earthbound (even with the figures that haunt them), but meld with the mist and sky. The grids, abstract and implacable, like time itself, bear the evidence of struggle and effort, but achieve a calm beauty that exists because of, rather than despite, the history that has become a part of their identity. And it is that sense of being, both hard-won and miraculously blessed, that marks all aspects of Kingerlee's work, as we witness the evidence of life without end, amen.

– John Mendelsohn