Gaze and Gloss
Jon Chan

Publisher • Grey Projects
Year • 2019
Pages • 56

“Gaze and Gloss, a new suite of paintings by Jon Chan, his second solo exhibition at Grey Projects. These paintings alternate between images of deeply ambivalent figures, drawn from various news and documentary sources, and images of public space security cameras. Taking his cue f rom two novels, Shusaku Endo's Silence and Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time, Jon pursues the alienation of individuals caught in a doubled estrangement. Jon's images depict various groups of people estranged from both their idealizations and the systems of coercive authority that presses upon their ideals a persistent threat of violence.

The scale of these small paintings are the artist’s recollection of the page, in particular the pages of sequential comics, with their single and multiple panelizations and the formal inferences of time passing. In their alternation between the seeing machine and the individuals responding to being seen and machine recording, Jon's images suggest storylines occurring mostly outside the frame - legal proceedings and disputes, neighbourhood crises, speeches, punitive endings and other consequences. The small misalignments in sightlines are telling - while the individual figures affect an awareness of being photographed or seen, they do not maintain direct eye contact with the camera; in the paintings Strings, 1987/2019 and Blindspots, the eyes are blocked from view or deliberately effaced. Even in the most direct of the new paintings See Through (all 2019), most of the men look just passed the camera to the crisis forming up behind it. To not see is the very premise of non- diegetic narrativity, of storytelling outside the visible screen. Yet sequential comics, though para-cinematic in its diegetic and non-diegetic narrativity, maintains important distinctions from cinema. It is exponentially slower, with potentially infinitely more occurring in the gap between each comic panel than between the filmic frames; and it is silent. The crucial ambivalence in Jon's paintings lie here. In the silence we ask what else is going on.”

— an excerpt from the Foreword by Jason Wee