Erik Jones skillfully blends together a realistic style with a more abstracted, pop-art aesthetic. Through complex layers of exploding pigments, Jones experiments with space and boundaries in his larger than life paintings of women. The paint on his canvases not only dissects his compositions into blocks of color, but also penetrates its confines of the canvas border by dripping onto the floor. In the artist’s most recent body of work, many of his paintings show off their intense shades by dripping onto the floor, creating a brilliant mess in every color.
In his piece titled The Slip, Jones displays a stunning portrait of a women sinking and slipping in a vivid, deep red paint. The organic nature of the paint splatters creates a hard contrast to Jones’ crisp, precise painting style. In his painting Under Form, the first layer of the painting is shown peeled away, exposing the viewer to the hidden form underneath. This relationship of exposing and hiding the subject appears throughout the artist’s body of work, creating a psychological tension between the viewer and subject.
