The Firestarter, 2020
Jack Dunnett is a painter who merges techniques of traditional oil painting with explorations into reactions between household chemicals, building materials and found pigments. Working with processes which build up and strip away layers, he creates paintings which examine relationships between prescriptive mark-making and chance elements, combining structure and chaos to create scenes which hold themselves in a state of balanced tension.
Depicting stories from an unreliable narrator, the building and redacting of each surface references the flawed and grasping nature of memory and perception. The subjective lens through which thoughts and events are experienced is captured by an unyielding ambiguity of scenario, spun through processes of obfuscation and revelation. This culminates in a picture which presents itself as informative yet questioning, demanding that the image be filtered again by the eye of the viewer.
"..for me the way events, stories, myths, and memories evolve in passing through not only the oral tradition, but through documentary and artistic depictions is always interesting to scrutinise. It's like a perpetual wheel that turns not metaphorically - untouched by intervention - but like a physical rolling stone in travel. On the journey it is inevitably affected by atrophy, addition and distortion caused by the surfaces over which it rolls, losing chunks and gaining layers. The framing of stories at the point of telling is often more indicative of the countless storytellers than it is of the event it claims to depict."
Finely detailed, intimate sized pieces on boards, the paintings bear heavy adornments of materiality, containing twisting forms caused by chemical reactions, and sculptural textures reminiscent of a variety of stones. Pockets of glaze and varnish draw the eye around the paintings; arranged embellishments which encase flecks of a crafter's trait among chance elements. Conscious painterly marks are juxtaposed with these formations, allowing the intervening hand of the artist to converse with the permanence of the more elemental furnishings. Figures either meld or jar with their environment, the characters aware they are acting in a perpetually staged scene.
