Jonas Ranson - Art Exhibition
JONAS RANSON - BANDE DESINEE'
PRINT WORKS BY JONAS RANSON
Exhibition extended - end of November
The phrase Bande Dessinée (also referred to as BD or bédé) is a French term meaning comic strips, literally drawn strip.It is not insignificant that the French term contains no indication of subject matter, unlike the American terms "comics" which imply an art form not to be taken seriously. The distinction of comics as the "ninth art" is prevalent in Francophone scholarship on the form (le neuvième art), as is the concept of comics criticism and scholarship itself.
Within the work of Jonas Ranson, colors are vivid with slyly garish black interstices, a representative veiling and distorting. The print works act as codes that signal a direct correspondence between what is represented on the picture plane and are an attempt at elegant mathematics and geometries that render not merely objects or visual representations, but dynamic, responsive systems. The grid assumes the role of the signifier, the foundation of a plastic discourse, while color operates on a more retinal perceptual level. This emphasis is one of containment and stasis, a fixed submit. Prints are achieved through treatment in both digital conversion and photographic Using permutations of geometric and architectural languages, pieces describe imagined algorithmic and structural ‘episodes'. The resulting compositions create an arcane and inverted perspective to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world. The style is characterized by a stripped-down, geometric structure of repetitive forms. There is an instinct for half-tone which attempts to bring balance and unity to the picture surface. This is the chief means of giving solidity to the forms and creating the fictive space.
The successive planes, independents circuits which cancel each other out, contradict each other. The work simultaneously constitutes the layers of one and the same physical reality, and the levels of one and the same mental reality, memory and spirit. Opposites collide but never resolve into a form that might constitute a center. Proportion is a principle in Nature which is a purely mathematical one and to be rightly interpreted by man through the means of geometry, therefore geometry is not only the gateway to science but it is also a noble portal opening wide into the realms of art. The only analog medium that is comparable to this computational media process implicit in the making of the work are games. Games, whether digital or analog, function precisely the same way computers do, they are derived from a system of rules that sets forth parameters or constraints for dynamic interactions. Code is essentially math, rules, procedures. The fact that Jonas Ranson's art is itself made of pixels and code, purely instructions, pure "score," initially without an overt physical manifestation, completely reframes the distribution infrastructure. A Computery, architectonic aesthetic. The works can be viewed as a kind of Entropy, seen as an emergence in reverse, a procedural approach to decay rather than regeneration. This procedural entropy is used as a means of simulating or stimulating a form of ‘computational' breakdown.