Jon Alibone
The paintings of Jonathan Alibone are an interrogation of western culture’s beliefs and values, and an exploration of the tension between faith and doubt, physical desire and spiritual longing. His work can be read as an articulation of the uncertainty and irreconcilable antagonisms inherent in our existence.
A process of loss and retrieval is enacted upon each painting; figures appear at once to both dissolve into and emerge from shallow, unmodulated and featureless space, their details lost or obscured in the layers of paint. Alibone sources images and text from film, magazines, pulp fiction, and pornography, setting them adrift from their original contextual moorings. The appropriated subjects’ cultural and symbolic associations are retained and co-opted; when re-imagined and repositioned, they achieve a new potency, becoming ambivalent signifiers of moral emptiness, scepticism, and self disgust. The viewer is no longer a passive consumer but a voyeur and participant, implicated in a nihilistic culture’s obsessions, perversions, and hunger for meaning.
Jonathan Alibone is an artist based in the United Kingdom , and is currently both a resident and curator at the Artist's Sanctuary in Northampton , England . He has exhibited widely and his work features in collections in the UK , Europe , and North America .
Terms
Artist’s terms
Phone: