JEREMY MANN
Multi-media
The thrill of following artists is not trying to guess what they’ll do next, but how they’ll circumvent your expectations. Case in point: Jeremy Mann. In recent years the artist, known primarily as a painter, has explored photography, interactive installations based on his photoshoots and even a full-length film, The Conductor, that he released last year. The joy of his work is being continuously surprised at what he comes up with, and what medium it will be in.
For his new show, one that may be his last for a year or possibly more, Mann will be showing new figures, new photographs and new cityscapes—including what may be his last full-color cityscape he ever paints—at EVOKE Contemporary August 30 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The show is inspired by the many forms of art he’s been experimenting with. “A dedicated and selfrespecting insight into my own art,” he says, “invoking more personal aesthetics gleaned from inspirations found in all forms of my creativity: painting, drawing, photography, filmmaking, writing and more.”
The show will include his last three cityscape paintings, including SF17, which is composed with bands of vertical paint that heighten, somewhat literally, the drama and mood of his rainy city scenes. His compositions—an element of his work
that is illuminated in Loic Zimmermann’s 2018 documentary on the artist, A Solitary Mann—are paramount above all else.
“Composition is definitely my formal element drink of choice, hence the over 170 cityscapes in the Composition series. I spend an enormous amount of time preparing the reference with a multitude of characteristics, so that when I begin to paint on a completely blank panel with only two or three marked points (perspectives, thirds and halves), most of the problems are solved, and I can simply ‘let go’ and trust my years of study and practice to allow the painting to have that elusive quality of life,” Mann says. “Many of the more vertical elements, as well as tonality and value systems, have arisen from inspirations found in my custom analog cameras and photography in the darkroom, as well as a long obsession pursuing the feeling of life by studying nature through plein air, looking for the link between how we perceive nature, and how she reveals herself to us.”
Color also plays an important role, evident in Note in Blue #6, which is keyed very cool in soft blues, and White Orchid, which is almost monochromatic in grays. How does he determine where to start with color, and where to end? He says, “When I tried to think of an answer for this, I realized I just choose on a whim. Whatever color harmony best works with the image from the homemade cameras (which therefore are heavily based on the light and the set design I created at the beginning of the photoshoot), combined with the overall ‘mood’ I wish to convey, which is generally ethereal and desaturated… very much how I see life and memory.”
It’s remarkable, then, that Mann has been able to translate so much of his artistic vision—especially the ethereal and desaturated—into so many different mediums, including film with The Conductor. Here’s an artist who is completely comfortable exploring outside his comfort zone, and creating new comfort zones entirely.
“Film is truly amazing to me, having only painted for so long. It has the possibility to truly elicit how life functions as we see it, with movement, time, relations (editing), sound and the verbal word,” he says. “But I will always be a painter as well. While film is a direct capture, a recording of life on playback, painting itself is creating life from nothing. With a blank surface upon which to hold your vision, and with the entire world of tools and materials to choose from, the mind, vision, values and statements of an artist is created out from the soul, and remains upon the surface, tangible, forever and solitary. In all the world, there is only one of that painting. What a thing that is to create…what a true feeling of what it is to be a human, with your fingers in the grit, bringing something beautiful to life, that only you can. That is the power of presence you feel when you stand before a painting in a museum or gallery, and nothing will ever replace that.”