Jason Brooks

Using canonical and amateur parochial artworks as source material, Jason Brooks crops and reproduces existing paintings in order to develop a nonlinear art-historical tradition rooted in form and color, rather than chronology. He considers Gustave Courbet’s L’origine du monde to be the first modern painting, in part because of its cropping, and references it in his “Origins” series, which seeks to better understand the tenets of abstract painting. Brooks most commonly works with an airbrush to produce hyperreal portraits and abstract canvases. Whereas airbrushing is typically used to erase imperfections, Brooks uses it to celebrate the nuances and markings of an individual. His “Ultraflesh” series of visceral, swirling impasto is also created with an airbrush—appearing three-dimensional from afar, yet revealing itself to be flat—raising questions surrounding illusion and reality.