Untitled (Upon Which Things Are Placed) Painting

'I intend my art to not so much reveal and illuminate, but to deepen mysteries, to declare the strange, even terrifying, in the familiar and banal around us.' Currently based in the United Kingdom, Jonathan Alibone is a resident of The Artist's Sanctuary in Northampton, England. He has exhibited widely and his work features in private collections in the UK, Europe, Russia, and North America. The paintings of Jonathan Alibone offer an exploration of the uncertainty and irreconcilable antagonisms inherent in our existence. They are populated with ghosts, and haunted by loss, unconsummated desire, and a nameless longing. His approach is to suggest incompleteness and absence, a removal or abandonment of the subjects, setting them adrift from their original contextual moorings so that they appear alienated, isolated in undefined and ambiguous spaces. In this light, Alibone’s work can be read as artefacts and remnants of culture: by deliberately using ephemera and found photographs that allow for a visceral charge and immediacy, he presents images that are at once both familiar and strange, allowing innuendo and a heightened sense of drama to extend meaning beyond what is depicted. The work’s realism becomes a means to not only engage the potential of imagination, but to explore the potential for significance. Executed in oils on an acrylic ground, a process of loss and retrieval is enacted upon the canvas; images are repeatedly created and then destroyed in order to heighten the tension between the figurative and the abstract. This strategy works to reinforce the perception of people and places as existing simultaneously in two worlds or states, dissolving or emerging from the paint. Like residual and indistinct memories, they are ambiguous and unreliable, half forgotten, half remembered.