Jordan Quintero

Jordan Quintero-

"And Mind itself is magic, coursing through the flesh...

and Flesh itself is magic, dancing on a clock

and Time itself, the magic length of God..."-

Leonard Cohen

Born into the gentle folds of the coastal mountain ranges of California, my first memory is the sound of the wind on long pulls down lonely western highways. I am of the promised land, and descended from the sea and the moon, conquered and conquerer, fugitive and magistrate, the beauty of their miscegenation is my inheritance. Continuing the proud West Coast tradition of heretical free thinking, border crossing counter-cultural production and innovative artistic practices, making art is my reach towards a personal freedom, my connection to the ancestors.  It is a statement of my unique being in the infinite maw of time, absurd, and doomed, but also sacred and beautiful.

My work develops organically, in the modernist tradition, growing through the soil of arduous, groping labor, watered by intuition and blooming out towards the magic light of conscious connection and intellectual communication.  Drawing from myriad intellectual and artistic traditions, my practice is a quest for the Philosopher's Stone of the modern age--the work is an analogue of my journey in search of the soul of contemporary man.  The resultant images are my iterations of scratching at that ancient itch: by re-presenting, I seek to gain perspective on the ever-present enigma of my own self-consciousness.

Influences/inspiration include comic book illustration, "old master" painting (esp Rembrandt and Goya), the modernist cannon, contemporary conceptual work, the current revival of figuration in the wake of "lowbrow" and "street art", the mission school, zen buddhism, christian theology, classical mythology, underground edm gatherings and events, Jungian psychology, surfing, love, bonsai trees, construction, modernist architecture and design, chaos theory and nature.