Jonathan Langfield

​

Impromptus

Through painted pictures, we can touch flesh without taction and feel what it is like to dance feverishly and confront loneliness and yearn for love. The painted picture possesses a grammar forged in the depths of our collective history. Meaningless globs of color transformed via a menagerie of gesture. My pictures celebrate the collision of paint and meaning. The magic that happens when marks are placed near other marks ...when the inert is at play.

~Jonathan Langfield

​

Not In My Backyard

The paintings of Jonathan Langfield present beautiful nightmares and intoxicating realities. They demarcate a landscape strewn with fragmented dreams inhabited by lonely wanderers and forlorn souls, bearing witness to a time out of joint. Between evocations of a lost American mythos and its foundering illusions, Langfield mines the past and present, leaving mines of paint that explode these illusions in bursts of brushwork full of color. His paint embodies a graceful nastiness and a nasty grace, sophisticated renderings of brutal bleakness and glimmers of future hope, even amidst the ruins. The hope, in ...part, is that painting can still work and that paint can still work its wonder, making us wonder about alternative possibilities to the barrenness of the contemporary. In losing ourselves, for a moment, in the alternations between attraction and repulsion that Langfield’s paintings promote, something happens, an opening to contemplating a way out of the forest, a way back from sea, even if we remain perpetually lost always already from the beginning.
~Dr. K. Malcolm Richards

​