Urban Art Association

Mr Jago | Piltdown Tactics | The Outsiders Newcastle, by LAZARIDES on Sept 28, 2013 17:11:43 GMT 1,

The Outsiders Newcastle is honoured to welcome UK urban art star Duncan Jago for his first solo exhibition with the Lazarides group of galleries, Piltdown Tactics. The show features Jago’s trademark large format canvases in acrylic and spray paint, the largest measuring six feet high by ten feet wide, and a number of works on paper.

Mr Jago, to address him by his street handle, has honed his own form of graffiti-influenced abstract expressionist art over the past decade and a half. His lavish canvases, seemingly effortless synchronisations of a loose painting style and coherent composition, are things of beauty that can be marvelled at on a purely aesthetic level.

“In terms of form, I absorb everything I admire,” explains the artist, “from Japanese woodcut prints, to early Manga comics, and concept artwork for science fiction movies. I was ten years old when graffiti began coming over from the States, growing up in rural Suffolk, so I don’t want to claim that it all comes from that.”

However, behind the opulent strokes and deftly assembled colour palettes a voracious mind and an avid imagination work in tandem to portray a complex vision. Like the finest instrumental electronic music, the canvases and their dramatic titles slam human perception into overdrive – bridging the gulf of comprehension between the average Western metropolitan experience and the all-too-threatening issues we as a generation are only just beginning to confront.

“Violence is perhaps the most regular theme in my work,” says Jago, “not just physical violence alone, but that which seems to thread through modern society.” To the viewer, the hulking futuristic forms looming out of Jago’s compositions could represent rampant emotional aggression, the overlooked cruelties of a hypocritical social democracy, or indeed the enforced scarcity that provides the ichorous fuel to keep our modern world turning. “My paintings are imagined futures,” continues Jago, “I suppose I’m processing a fear of the days to come. It’s difficult to be optimistic when wars of resources are still going on. Moreover, I can’t see any way out either.”

The heralds of Jago’s brutal new age are cybernetic kraken, champions of entropy and ushers of catastrophe. Their forms are often visible in the artist’s portrait-format character studies, to anyone with an over-active imagination or a doyenne of dystopian science fiction. His Human Fossils series is inspired by the thought of epic conflict between these brutes, each on its own side as a metaphor for individualism’s unseemly scramble, where sharp elbows become plasma cannons and a thick skin is represented by an ablative exoskeleton. There truly are no friends in this game, and for what? “All that crap we’ve harvested, will we be buried with it like the tribal chiefs of old were buried with their treasures?” says the artist, “archaeologists in eons to come would find it very confusing.” In this way Jago’s ambitious works depict the Piltdown Tactics of the exhibition’s name, as we all scrap in this florid muck for the sake of a legacy like that of the hoaxed millennia-old human remains unearthed in Piltdown, southern England.

What delineates Jago though is his use of aesthetic beauty, however transcendent, to represent this sobering vision. This may be a shocking melodrama, but it grips the imagination with the ingenuity of the master storyteller, the wit of the court jester, and the bombast of the prodigal composer.

The Outsiders Newcastle is honoured to welcome UK urban art star Duncan Jago for his first solo exhibition with the Lazarides group of galleries, Piltdown Tactics. The show features Jago’s trademark large format canvases in acrylic and spray paint, the largest measuring six feet high by ten feet wide, and a number of works on paper.

Mr Jago, to address him by his street handle, has honed his own form of graffiti-influenced abstract expressionist art over the past decade and a half. His lavish canvases, seemingly effortless synchronisations of a loose painting style and coherent composition, are things of beauty that can be marvelled at on a purely aesthetic level.

“In terms of form, I absorb everything I admire,” explains the artist, “from Japanese woodcut prints, to early Manga comics, and concept artwork for science fiction movies. I was ten years old when graffiti began coming over from the States, growing up in rural Suffolk, so I don’t want to claim that it all comes from that.”

However, behind the opulent strokes and deftly assembled colour palettes a voracious mind and an avid imagination work in tandem to portray a complex vision. Like the finest instrumental electronic music, the canvases and their dramatic titles slam human perception into overdrive – bridging the gulf of comprehension between the average Western metropolitan experience and the all-too-threatening issues we as a generation are only just beginning to confront.

“Violence is perhaps the most regular theme in my work,” says Jago, “not just physical violence alone, but that which seems to thread through modern society.” To the viewer, the hulking futuristic forms looming out of Jago’s compositions could represent rampant emotional aggression, the overlooked cruelties of a hypocritical social democracy, or indeed the enforced scarcity that provides the ichorous fuel to keep our modern world turning. “My paintings are imagined futures,” continues Jago, “I suppose I’m processing a fear of the days to come. It’s difficult to be optimistic when wars of resources are still going on. Moreover, I can’t see any way out either.”

The heralds of Jago’s brutal new age are cybernetic kraken, champions of entropy and ushers of catastrophe. Their forms are often visible in the artist’s portrait-format character studies, to anyone with an over-active imagination or a doyenne of dystopian science fiction. His Human Fossils series is inspired by the thought of epic conflict between these brutes, each on its own side as a metaphor for individualism’s unseemly scramble, where sharp elbows become plasma cannons and a thick skin is represented by an ablative exoskeleton. There truly are no friends in this game, and for what? “All that crap we’ve harvested, will we be buried with it like the tribal chiefs of old were buried with their treasures?” says the artist, “archaeologists in eons to come would find it very confusing.” In this way Jago’s ambitious works depict the Piltdown Tactics of the exhibition’s name, as we all scrap in this florid muck for the sake of a legacy like that of the hoaxed millennia-old human remains unearthed in Piltdown, southern England.

What delineates Jago though is his use of aesthetic beauty, however transcendent, to represent this sobering vision. This may be a shocking melodrama, but it grips the imagination with the ingenuity of the master storyteller, the wit of the court jester, and the bombast of the prodigal composer.