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Torrance Art Museum

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Exhibition Detail Jean-Pierre Roy First Eyes on the World Torrance Art Museum 3320 Civic Center Drive Torrance, CA 90503 November 21st - December 19th Opening: November 21st 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
	Jean-Pierre Roy, Landscape or Questioning the continued relevance of investigating the state of the pre-expansionate universe when it appears that time itself did not exist to measure the change, 2009, Oil on canvas, 72” x 228” © Courtesy of the Artist and Torrance Art Museum Jean-Pierre Roy, Hazard us for Prophecy, 2009, Oil on canvas, 38” x 38” © Courtesy of the Artist and Torrance Art Museum Jean-Pierre Roy, Sight Specific, 2009, oil on canvas, 70” x 108” © Courtesy of the Artist and Torrance Art Museum	< \|\| >

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painting, landscape

> DESCRIPTION

Gallery Two

First Eyes on the World
Jean-Pierre Roy

Jean-Pierre Roy translates Edmund Burke’s 18th century idea of the Sublime (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757) for our current era by replacing the classical ruins and dark forests of the Romantic landscape painters with modern shorn buildings, columns of smoke, twisted steel, and smashed concrete. It is the Hudson River School born of a post-Hollywood sense of the world. Roy’s iconic compositions are pictorial vehicles for the contemplation of our current cultural and social anxieties. Taking cues from today's media, Roy re-imagines these post-apocalyptic dystopias as secular totems to the forces of change. Through the creative process of inventing these imaginary landscapes, he attempts to understand the fixed systems of existence while seducing viewers into the painted space.

While acknowledging their cinematic escapist influences ( i.e., The Road Warrior, Planet of the Apes, The Matrix), Roy's dystopian constructions of the new American Mythology join a more psychological tradition of apocalyptic self-exploration and spectacle, where landscapes change their meaning with time – buildings become memorials, barren wastelands stand as national monuments to the nature of change, and cities dream about when they were once whole.

Conjuring images from his imagination to create "internal landscapes" ensures that Roy is constantly engaged with the discovery of the material relationships involved in world building and world destroying. The search for a balance of opposing forces – atomic cohesion vs. repulsion, human vs. natural systems of organization, precision vs. abstraction, hard vs. soft, and broken vs. whole – is what drives the artist's desire to quantify the world.

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