Jordan Kasey

Jordan Kasey paints bodies in enclosed domestic spaces with close zoomed-in cropping, giving a feeling of intimacy – and perhaps claustrophobia. The characters occupy the majority of the scene and are painted in shades of dark grey and black, as if in deep shadow or made of polished stone. The figures are heavy objects, in both senses of the word – alive but burdened, and static and volumetric like statues. Kasey’s wry suggestions of confinement and boredom feel highly topical, but they are in dialogue with the history of still life painting as much as with contemporary work. Cézanne’s instruction in a letter from 1904 to ‘deal with nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone’ seems particularly relevant to the way Kasey analyses and renders forms. In Grapefruits the breakfast citrus fruits are the focal point, glowing like orbs. The light they reflect shimmers on the surface of the figure looking down on them, chin in hand: thinking, wondering, waiting.