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Factory (2010) |
Taking his cue from the Precisionists of the early 1900s, like Stella, Demuth, Driggs, and Crawford, who depicted their fascination with architecture and city planning, Josafat intertwines his structural interests with his exuberant imagination and his deep awareness of the character of buildings.
By keeping his building canvases unpopulated and surrounded on all sides by open air, Josafat treats us to a new perspective on the everyday objects of our environment, making them the centerpieces, or the lead characters, in his pieces. The fact that he focuses on the bulkiest objects of our creation makes the pieces that much more exhilarating, and elicits from the viewer feelings of liberation and sky-high possibility.
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Watercolor #8 |
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Watercolor #12 |
But even though his work was inspired by those travel books, Josafat's work isn't clear-cut travel painting or documentary. There is too little documenting and too much stylizing in them for that. Rather, Josafat creates his building pieces similar to the way Modigliani created his nudes. His work begins in the real, physical world where he finds his inspiration, but it then diverges off to a metaphysical plane, employing various techniques to capture a glimpse of the building's character, to introduce his aesthetic ideas, and to create a pleasing picture for the viewer.
Some of Josafat's building portraits also exhibit a round-mirror or fish-eye perspective which compliments the psychedelic color use, further distorting reality in favor of encouraging the viewer's direct interaction with the pieces.
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Watercolor #9 |
Josafat's portraits of suspended vehicles are similarly exciting. Instead of painting cars, motorcycles and sport trucks, he focuses in on those vehicles which are most known for sitting parked for long periods of time: trailers, campers, ice cream trucks, taco trucks, etc. By doing so, he highlights the house-like quality of them, and reminds us that it's not where these vehicles go that's important, but it's the people that are in them and their interactions that make them interesting. In a way, his vehicle portraits and his building portraits shed light on each other, and upon doing so, their strong spirits of community, enterprise and achievement are unlocked.
We hope you keep it up, Jordan! Beauty and compassion are flowing through you just like water through a river.
[Jordan Josafat's newest painting is on display at Thumbprint Gallery and will remain so through the Works of Wisdom exhibition. For more information on Josafat, feel free to visit his website at jordanjprojects. weebly.com.]
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