Carter Presents, Jonathan Gent, 6.30-9.30pm, info: www.carterpresents.com
Jonathan Gent’s paintings are perceptive observations on human complexity. Humorous, wry and acutely tuned, his work is punchy and fast, sometimes strikingly minimal and the paintings can often be deceptively simple. Gent’s obsession is with the line and the expansion of ideas through its limitless possibilities. His observations on close examination feel painfully incite-full becoming visual poems keenly observed.
In this series of new paintings, Jonathan Gent embarks on a personal journey into the depths of English consciousness.
These anarchic and idiomatic paintings distilled within the confines of a loose Heraldic St George Cross are painfully funny. They mine Gent’s own personal history with that of a wider shared one. Pets, sexual fantasies, taboo’s and relationships real and imagined converge onto the canvas. Gent’s own life becomes woven into a dreamlike narrative. Paul Gascoine’s number 19 England shirt haunt the paintings and whose tears after being booked during England’s exit in the semi finals of the World Cup in 1990 became the tears of the English nation. Gascoine’s subsequent fall from grace and his very public descent into drugs and booze addiction and bankruptcy personifies and parallels a schizophrenic socio-economic English decline where the gap between the affluent and the poorest is as great now as at any time in our history. If Gascoine embodies the tragic face of Englishness, his England team mate of the time Gary Lineker with his steady rise to footballing aristocracy, embodies a bullish England that wont lie down. An England of aspiration, wealth, success and power. The market stall traders son from Leicester more palatable than the grocer’s daughter from Grantham.
Born in 1976 in Cheshire England, Jonathan Gent will be having his frst solo exhibition at Carter London January 2010.
Other solo shows include:XVA Gallery the Creek Art Fair Dubai 2008, HOTEL ‘America’, London 2004, GLU Gallery Los Angeles USA 2004, GLU Gallery ‘Shapes and Colours’, Los Angeles USA 2005.
