Photo-unreality
Anna Altman
For the past two years, Jason Bryant has been exploring the complex link between painting and film through large-scale, cropped portraits–almost photo-realistic ones–of celebrity faces and film stills.
From a young age, Bryant found himself entranced by the world presented by movies, describing himself as "captivated by the visual elements" of film. "It’s a world we all get lost in," he says. Bryant attempts to realize and sharpen the simultaneity of these two worlds: the image world of film, celebrity, and popular culture in concert with the real world we inhabit physically.
In his most recent series of paintings, Bryant has refined his subject matter, culling portraits and snapshots from movies, capturing stills in abstract and unusual ways, and, perhaps most importantly, cropping images in way that depersonalizes the subjects–we never see their eyes. Bryant tries to "capture a seminal cinematic moment without such a recognizable face."
Bryant immerses himself in the images and music of film while he paints in order to deepen his involvement in the world of film. This process grounds him in the familiarity of cinematic imagery while lengthening the fleeting moments of movies so they have more meaning than a single, awkward frame of a familiar face might suggest. As a result, not only does the narrative of the cinematic moment become more important than the face of the specific actor, but Bryant’s painstaking yet graceful execution becomes more pronounced too.
Bryant’s cropped images relate to the inability of anyone to fully perceive the world. "We only perceive twenty-five percent of the things we see," Jason Bryant asserts. "Cropped images are a metaphor for that."
The scale of Bryant’s work is just as essential to his conception of his work as the close cropping of his subjects. Bryant’s large canvasses are a screen through which the viewer perceives Bryant’s subject and, more broadly, the world. The larger the canvas, the more the image bleeds into the viewer’s periphery, limiting her ability to perceive the world beyond the present image, and distorting the object itself. In Trouble Sleeping Bryant zooms in on the fluorescent green numbers of a digital clock, evoking the terrible claustrophobia and distorted perspective that comes with insomnia.
The marked flatness of Bryant’s compositions mirrors his perception of how film flattens its subjects, making them seem both physically and personally two-dimensional. But Bryant’s stylistic choice also reveals his interest in studying celebrity with the close attention one might give to a still life object, or to a landscape. Bryant glorifies the celebrities he depicts–they are larger-than-life–but he also makes them seem somewhat un-human. Their familiar human features become something else: aesthetic, formal, objects and alignments to be studied slowly, as if for the first time.
