Holsworthy Gallery
Jonathan Gibbs’s first solo London show was a tour-de-force performance in the ordinarily sketchy and undemonstrative materials of charcoal, pencil, three or four earthen-coloured pastels, and an occasional veil-thin acrylic wash. To provocatively deploy such provisional materials as these — and in a way permitting the artist to rope together several mainstream but discrepant concerns of modern abstract art and to strike from their union a vibrant, even jazzy, mix — is no mean feat. These 20-odd new works adeptly enlist compositional techniques associated with both Constructivist and post-war British... Read The Rest →
»Works that live dangerously«
Times – … Jonathan Gibbs is as different as can be, except in one particular: in his paintings, pastels and collages the overall statement is simple and direct, but the means of arriving at it is complicated in the extreme. Most of the bigger works are the result of imposing various patterns on squares of paper then shuffling and patterning until an aesthetically satisfying outcome is reached. And the outcome is very satisfying indeed: Gibbs has an exceptional sense of colour, mostly very subdued, with a lot of blacks and... Read The Rest →
Holsworthy Gallery
These cool abstractions, with their carefully wrought articulations and muted colours, suggest Constructivist antecedence and inspiration, but what Jonathan Gibbs has learnt from hard masters has been thoroughly assimilated to his own purpose. He demonstrates the capacity to develop an expressive range within tight formal constraints. Thus the decorative jazz of some of the work, with its suggestion of a somewhat constricted deliberation of effect, gives way elsewhere to a freer, more relaxed gestural deployment of familiar motives of semi-circle, bar, block and line. Chance and suggestion seem to be... Read The Rest →
»Drawings & Collages«
»Maximum of functionalism with a minimum outlay of energy« goes the old constructivist saw. Although Jonathan Gibbs’ collages eschew such a straight formulaic approach, his vocabulary and methods are grounded in the »rational« and »intelligible« procedures of constructivism. In Gibbs’ work the niggling interference of free-lines and their subjective course is discouraged by a drawing technique which adopts the devices of collage: blocking, overlapping, stencilling. Gibbs’ drawings are assembled in freely articulated segments, usually in the form of broken up grids scattered and twisted across the surface or in blocks... Read The Rest →