Face To Face: The Paintings and Drawings of James Singelis

20 June - 20 December 2023

The Exhibition
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Essay By David Gibson
JIM SINGELIS: BEING, THE STORY
The paintings of James Singelis pursue their subject with a weathering intensity and kaleidoscopic imagination. Singelis has looked all around the world and settled on the one subject most worthy of expressive deconstruction: his own appearance. If art is about being creatively present, then what better medium than the surface of the artist's own face? Why fiddle with a world of constructed appearances when what needs affixing is the great mystery of self-identity? Each painting in Singelis' ongoing series is a progressive answer to each of these questions. It takes a simple yet universal theme and runs with it, making the face of the artist a world entire.

Picture a room filled with close-up portraits, seemingly of the same person, though each looking and feeling disparately different from the others. One feels a strong presence in them, a psychological intensity that requires a viewer’s attention, as license to force a projected submission, like icons in a grotto, or statuettes or cenotaphs in a graveyard. There’s something ancient in their eyes, the recollection of cultural memory that is eons old. To encounter this collective of visages is to feel the weight of their memory, and to falter under their expectation. Yet to take them one by one, to encounter each portrait and attend to it esthetically and formally in terms of its idiosyncratic nature, this then can become a productive experience with a broad range of context.
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Looking at the many faces that comprise the creative context of Singelis’ output, one is hard-pressed to imagine how they all leap from the reflection of one man’s face. Yet this is in fact the absolute truth. His oeuvre’s complexity strikes at the commonplace notion that a man is his features, and those features are set, as if in stone. That he is a “type” of person when in fact he is all men. Seeing all these images together is like walking through a house of mirrors, for what we see in him we also see in ourselves: impassiveness, fear, boredom, patience, fragility, saintliness, sadness, the bubbling up of an internal chaos, and so much more.
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Jim Singelis true subject is being, in and of itself, and his own being as the prime example. His face is an incubator for human emotion and its innate interiority. His faces are not the nameless crowd but are each characters in their own right, each reaching for a visual note of unique vibration. This symphony of self-expression is one that forever imbues us with its primal power. It’s one we’ll want to hear over and over again as it echoes the secrets of creation.
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All Archival Pigment Prints are Available at Varying Sizes
James Singelis

Artist's Statement

Jim Singelis approaches painting as if it were any other kind of job, and he goes to the studio and paints every day whether he feels like it or not.

He started doing self-portraits as an academic exercise, trying at first for an accurate likeness. Then he began to loosen up and let things happen, and this brought unexpected results: the drawings began to seem more real than what he saw in the mirror as well as more engaging and provocative. And although the portraits are not photographic images, they do describe him: they portray something other than what he looks like but show who he honestly is.

Singelis sees each painting as an opportunity to re-invent himself, and each painting is a visual essay, the diary of an attempt to make a visible record of something intuitive and personal. It is not intended to be the illustration or snapshot of an emotional moment, but rather a history of the interior crosscurrents that occurred while he was painting.

He puts a lot of marks on a canvas, and many end up being obliterated or obscured. Those that remain need to feel honest. In the beginning he wanted nothing more than to be a draughtsman, and to this day nothing pleases him more than a tangle of lines that also depicts a face. He tries to create a canvas where the seemingly random play of colors, shapes and lines coalesce into a recognizable image.

Self-absorption undoubtedly plays a part, but he also does self-portraits because he is ready and willing to pose any hour of the day or night, and because the face compels attention. We take notice of the entire figure, but the face captivates. Even the most distorted abstraction of a face can convey a distinct persona, someone we can recognize and for whom we can feel empathy