Details:
① Artwork:
Romantique
In this painting, a woman lying in repose floats over a stage. Meanwhile, the drawn-back curtains behind her partially reveal a monochrome landscape with a grouping of figures as moody pine trees and clouds loom off in the distance.
The artist's ongoing series “Double Illusions" is based on philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s notion that illusion is the true dimension of social activity. His oil paintings translate psychic structures such as nostalgia and neurosis into classically-painted illusionistic spaces via dramatic color and lighting motifs. It's a series that offers multiple meanings via philosophical, literary, and art-historical interpretations.
John Denniston II uses oil paint to improvise within modes of traditional realism. By abstracting chaotic scenes drawn from classical formulas, he offers a novel and surrealistic direction for historical painting practices. By manipulating linear perspective and color temperature, Denniston heightens the sense of discord in his narratives, which become critical takes on postindustrial society.
Specs:
③ Artist:
John Denniston II uses oil paint to improvise within realistic picture-making structures. By staging scenes of chaotic abstraction from classic formulas, he challenges the ideological implications founded in historic painting practices, opening within them a surreal scene of figural possibilities. In taking on the discourses of philosophy and anthropology with an artist’s introspection and imagination, he pressures the ability of paint to evoke the conceptual out of the formal, generates new commentaries, and lightens the weight of burdensome logic.
John Denniston II was born in 1999. He received his BFA in painting from Pratt Institute in 2022 and has taken intensive courses with The Art Digger Lab (2021), MICA (2016), Academy of Art University (2015), and Art Center College of Design (2013-2014).
He mounted a solo exhibition at Swivel Gallery (2024, 2022) and The Emerson (2022).
His work has been featured in group shows at Swivel (2024, 2022), Everyday Moonday Gallery (2023), New Collectors Gallery (2023), Strada Gallery (2023), Vardan Gallery (2023), Pratt Institute galleries (2022, 2021, 2020) and Gallery House (2019, 2021).
