Urban Art Association

Should be good, wish I could go!

I think you're going to be very pleasantly surprised with this new collection Coach. Very!!

Ha, I've seen them all, they're some of his best artworks to date in my opinion...

Jaybo doesn't want to give too much away until the show opens... But here's some sneak peeks...









Soze Gallery will be opening its doors for its first exhibition at this Location.We are proud to announce this first exhibition will showcase the work of Jaybo Monk. Jaybo will be exhibiting for the first time in Los Angeles and this will also be his first Solo Exhibition... in California.

Jaybo has created all new work for the exhibition that will be part of a installation that he will be working on during his residency at Soze Gallery.

Soze Gallery Los Angeles
652 Mateo St #107
Los Angeles, ca 90021


Contact: sozegallery@gmail.com 415-525-0674 for Appointments

Here is a brief Bio about the Artist written by Serena Valietti

Jaybo is an urban wanderer, a traveler that moves in the space of that unfinished metropolis, that is the world, among memories, fragments and traces abandoned in the urban landscape, that works like a theater of the human joy and pain, studded with relationships that slide between first glances and deep emotions.

During this wandering, the painter meets the unexpected, what happens by chance, and is inspired by that accident that catches the eye and the brain, that incidental event, detail, word or shape that breaks in along the way and that he takes with him to the canvas.

Jaybo builds his poetics on these small accidents and unwanted mistakes that happen. He takes advantage of what happens at the wrong time, in the wrong place, his research in painting is about trying to be open to the unknown and to the accidental, without prejudices but with amazement and curiosity.

It is exactly this curiosity that makes Jaybo attracted to the unseen, from things left on the streets, to items forgotten around, to left-overs or something no one
notices anymore, things as lost as he is in himself, like a peculiar expression on a passerby’s face or a move of a stranger's body walking along the streets.

Inspiration can also come from a small detail that attracts the painter's attention flipping through the pages of an art magazine or a book about the great masters of art, from Bacon, to Modigliani and Leonardo. Everything that runs away from the standards or that remains lost in the cracks of a reality always more lived in fast forward sneaks into the painter's mind and comes together in his imaginative world.

Here is the basis of Jaybo's visual alphabet, a series of silent frames that tell forgotten stories, unveil secrets and memories lost in time along the way.
Jaybo's art is like a song made by images, it's a composition of feelings and suggestions, where the details that catch the artist's eye work like musical samples. All those inspiring fragments become part of a soundtrack played with brushes, following the tones of colors and the rhythm given by the strokes, with a canvas as the background.
That's the beauty of Jaybo's art, an unexpected chaotic harmony of beauty that takes shape in feminine bodies or animals, in faces and twisted legs, in smiles and grimaces. Once the canvas has accommodated everything, Jaybo breaks in with his hazardous brushstrokes, taking the risk of messing up the work and making mistakes, but at the same time this risk is a chance to let the unexpected happen and realize that an apparent mistake has turned into something beautiful. Then comes geometry, the archetype of the beauty of the world that first breaks the pictorial rhythm of the human body and then mingles itself with flesh and bones on the canvas.

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” as Francis Bacon said. This sounds perfect to define the unconventional beauty of Jaybo's subjects. They are perfectly imperfect in their inner harmonies, from compositions, to transfigured faces and contorted bodies, with their distortions used to express the movement from the inside, to the flesh of the body.

Everything in Jaybo's painting is livened up by tension and movement, the same continuous motion that he seeks in his life constantly going with the flow of change and avoiding crystallization, fixed forms, labels and stereotypes, escaping from inertia and inactivity. The artist is a runaway for his attitude, and also for

his biography, he left his home in the south of France at a very young age and moved in Kreutzberg, Berlin in the early Eighties.

Since then Jaybo hasn't stayed still and he has kept on exploring the creative world in every direction: he's been involved in street theater and performances, he moved to fashion, founding the street wear company Irie Daily and he created a magazine, Style and the Family Tunes and then he embraced the canvas, a white square of creative freedom, where the painter loses and finds himself again and again, beyond starting a dialogue with the viewer.

Jaybo in his creative approach continues to be a runaway, never settling for what he already knows. He is on a constant journey across new techniques and new artistic practices, because art, as life, to him continues only if people take up the challenge of constant change.

What enthuses the painter in fact is the living, the vibrant, what is in evolution, in a state of becoming, what is in progress. His interest is in the act of painting rather than in the result as a final product, in the creative travel rather than in the destination. He cares only about the ways to go through the work of art, measuring himself with it.

According to Jaybo canvases are dead once they are finished, they are what remains of the painter's “acts of art” - as he calls those moments in which the ego totally disappears, the self is completely absorbed in the creative process and there is just the pure freedom of creativity. When the viewer looks at the canvas, once art is shown, its existence materializes. It's the spectator that makes the pictures as Marcel Duchamp said.
Jaybo pushes the master's statement forward by adding that with his art he tries to provide a platform for everybody to play with their own visual bank: the viewers start a process of subjective, associative reconstruction of their deepest perceptions by reactivating their hidden, forgotten memories and feelings, that are lit by the artistic,sparkly surface once again.
A true encounter with art, can be the chance for both the viewer and the painter to discover themselves again, through the canvas, as Adorno used to say, “Art knows us better than ourselves.”

Damn. Looks good. Looks REAL good!

great Jaybo - all best for the show!!