Jack Trolove’s practice spans 20 years of working with the body as political site and poetic substance.
His decision to make often luscious, figurative paintings, is born from a deep commitment to champion space for the non-rational world. Making paintings ‘about feeling’ is his way of corrupting masculinity’s stakes in ‘knowing’. His is a practice of thinking through the body not about the body. The artist uses figurative painting to centre embodied knowledge. To support direct intuitive communication between bodies through that live space between the body in the painting and the body of the viewer.
He makes paintings that remind us how quickly and potently we can feel.
Thick, unruly streaks of pigment play out larger than life size in front of the viewer, in the real-time way tactile paintings and performance do. Here, they sculpt thick second-skins for us to feel through.
The old school Face-Recognition Technology of ‘portraiture’, conjures us an in-road. Yet to stop at the face or the body in the image, is to miss the work. It’s an invitation into abstraction and unravelling. Trolove’s not interested in the ‘traditions’ of portraiture, of finding a likeness to a sitter – in most cases there are no sitters. He consciously uses the mechanism of ‘portraiture’ for its familiarity and baggage, it’s function as a hospitable kind of valve into a new space. Essay excerpt J. Kalsy.