Royal Jarmon
Royal Jarmon’s paintings and sculptures are vibrant expressions of reality that explore visual aesthetics, spatial imaginings, and perceptions of our surroundings. His work creates an alternate view of reality, exaggerating perspectives and forms, saturating colors, and distorting recognizable objects, images, and items.
Jarmon’s works are concerned with social culture and popular human experiences navigating life and the world around us, and his pieces play with our expectations for how landscapes, objects, and scenes are viewed and understood. Fire escapes strewn with bottles, food detritus, and cans of soda and beer become playful landscapes and still lifes. The spatial perspective is flattened and the inanimate objects become living characters reflecting themes of consumption, leisure, and the everyday, while also transforming this space with hyper colors, airbrushed backgrounds, and exaggerated scales into an illusionistic world. In Untitled (Car), Jarmon paints a birds-eye view of a Nascar car, which is flattened into a two dimensional recto-linear form, abstracting our understanding of perspective and movement. All sides of the car except for its belly are visible, and its massive form takes up almost the entirety of the canvas. Jarmon blends airbrush with rougher, visible brush strokes, further complicating the rendering of the scene and critically engaging with paint as a material and the history of the medium. His subjects -- cars, fire escapes, beer cans, etc. -- are all common and recognizable images, which lends them to a larger project of poking and prodding at popular culture, human experience, and our relationship to both our internal and external environments. Jarmon’s works engage with contemporary digital and Internet culture, and his image making is in direct dialogue to our current, present day reality.
Royal Jarmon was born in Sacramento, CA and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Jarmon has been creating art from an early age, and spent years of his adult life educating and teaching himself art history, painting, and theory and developing his practice through these pursuits. His work has been included in shows at The Hole, Castor Gallery, and in the travelling exhibition Got It For Cheap, run by Zero Zero gallery in L.A. You can catch his work in a recent group show, Stand Still - A Still Life Show, at Allouche Gallery (NYC) on view through November 26th.
