January

paintings by Peter Jones

13 January - 18 February 2006

January (detail after The Limbourg Brothers) 2005

Two paintings underpin this exhibition - The Unknown Soldier and Elck and Nemo (Everyone and No One).

These two paintings capture the ideas and developments of Jones’s work over the last seven years, that has entirely focused on narrative or story-telling in painting, and which also reflects an intense and prolonged reading of the paintings by Pieter Breugel the Elder, particularly Children’s Games (1560), The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559) and Hunters in The Snow (1565) (thought to represent January/February in The Seasons series).

Elck & Nemo (Everyone and No-one) 2004

Using the sixteenth century pictorial concept of a ‘world view’ and radial compositions, The Unknown Soldier and Elck and Nemo are filled with visual rhetoric - a tense dialogue between and about the character of a picture and the realisation of the content of the picture by the ‘painting’, and of course the significance of the story the painting encapsulates. Reminiscent of the No-Man’s Land of The Great War - a war that Jones considers to be a major cross-roads of historical and social change - these complex paintings present an upside-down world at the junction between the past and the present.

The Unknown Soldier 2004

Jones's paintings are unashamedly concerned with the human condition - its root is always at war with itself, searching for clarity and vision while wrestling with the limits of that condition. This is particularly evident in Elck and Nemo - here the pushing and pulling is about searching for the middle path, and this chimes with the Scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard “although there exist only individual men, although each one is independent of the other in his existence, the mind nevertheless possesses the general notion of humanity which belongs to each of them”. But it is the emblematic character of The Unknown Soldier that more poignantly signifies a personal struggle for identity and self-belief. The soldier is Jones but is not Jones - it is everyone and no one. The dialectical framework that supports these opposites - relating objects and characters that are dependent on but simultaneously independent of one another - provides the narrative structure for The Unknown Soldier. 

Notes

The Unknown Soldier is a soldier who died on the battlefields at the Western Front and who was buried at Westminster Abbey in 1920 as a mark of civic respect and honour to the thousands who gave their lives during The Great War. Elck and Nemo is loosely based on a drawing called Elck (1558) by Breugel in the British Museum. Elck was a sixteenth century fictitious folklore character who was performed on floats at carnivals at Flemish cities in the mid-sixteenth century. Nemo is featured in Breugal’s drawing as the counterpoint to the main thrust of the narrative, about the folly of pursuing self-enlightenment.  

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