b. 1985 in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Lives and works in Los Angeles
Jonny Negron’s paintings whisk endemic scenarios into spheres of suspended artifice. For nearly two decades, the self-taught artist has developed an instinct for mise-en-scènes that depict an array of social intercourses, from portraits of individuals appended with symbolic matter to groupings of figures communing in revelrous overflow. Often, these social intercourses make way for the staging of objects and perishables that are cast off from these transient relational exchanges. Within these relational configurations, Negron’s work expresses the way in which diametric, emotive forces congeal under the headings of personality, ego and communal exchange.
Negron’s forms and compositions are often reminiscent of animated and illustrative practices. This vernacular serves as a foundation and launching point for the artist’s painterly language. Encouraged by the operations of these formats, Negron embraces the flatness of his paper or canvas so that layered and glazed imagery constantly calls to the horizontal, flat surface quality of the underlying substrate. In doing so, Negron points towards the linear coordinates of story, character and diegesis that expand from the finite information enclosed in each ‘cell.’
The characters of these paintings speak to one another: both literally, through images of conversation and dialogue; and figuratively, in the sense that one becomes familiarized with repeated personae through exposure to Negron’s catalog. Negron is consistently negotiating with the personalities of these individuals, revising and editing them, or simply filling them out through suggestive veneers. The manner in which these character-subjects are generated then becomes analogous to the painterly practice itself, one marked by a pigment-aggregating process.
Negron’s work adroitly wraps itself around the mythological, embracing myths derived from major religions, the occult, classical visual and literary traditions and contemporary myth-making machinery. More recently, Negron’s paintings have placed emphasis on depicting tableaux of distinctly current cosmopolitan life: androgyne figures find themselves seated at bars, tables and booths, emerging out of cacophonous groupings in clubs and other discreet locales. These works invoke a sardonic, yet effervescent, take on social realism, launching the genre into a proximate consideration of hyper-pop sentiment. Additional tacit allusions are made towards pious, reverential and devotional painting, through Negron’s deployment of compositional structures and depth-perspectives that are indicative of Byzantium and early Renaissance painting.
The semiotic shrapnel of contemporary aesthetic interfaces are lodged in Negron’s syrupy tableaux. Suspended in beguiling saturation, Negron configures these portraits with symbolic values borrowed from the tarot, religious iconography and other circulating signifiers. relating the mythological origins of various iconography to the continuous process of their co-option and distortion, especially within the production and marketing of consumable goods.
La Vison Del Pan
Galerie Crèvecœur
Paris
K11 Foundation
Shanghai (CN)
2024
Digitalis
Danxia Foundation
Beijing
2023
Art Basel Hong Kong:
Discoveries, with Chateau Shatto
Hong Kong
2021
Spirits
Château Shatto
Los Angeles
2021
BLUE DREAM
Qingdao Art Museum,
Qingdao
2020
Small Map of Heaven
Château Shatto
Los Angeles
2018
(upcoming)Dolce Far Niente
Foundry Seoul
Seoul, S. Korea
2026
A String in the Maze,
Megan Mulrooney/Martha’s
Los Angeles
2025
Electricity-Shadow
Château Shatto
Los Angeles
2024
Public Private
Pond Society
Shanghai
2023
Portraits
Galerie Crèvecœur
Paris
2023
A Maze Zanine, Amaze
Zaning, A-Mezzaning, Meza-9
David Zwirner
New York
2022
Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose
Japanese American Cultural & Community Center
Los Angeles
2022
Heroic Bodies
Rudolph Tegners Museum
Dronningmølle, Denmark
2022