March exhibit
JONATHAN WILNER

The opening reception will be March 2, 6-8 pm.

From March 2nd to April 6th we will be showing “Mindscapes: A Journey into the Unconscious.” This exhibit will showcase the incredible oil paintings of surrealist painter Jonathan Wilner.

“Inspired by the possibilities introduced to the arts by André Breton’s Surrealist manifesto, the conflation of dreaming and wakeful consciousness, this exhibit explores the alchemy produced when one reaches into the unconscious while awake. What peeks through is screened under the scanning eye of critical awareness that when one is asleep remains dormant. The stuff of the unconscious can surface because it remains virtually unknown. The implications of the liminal forms remain a mystery to both creator and viewer. And it is in this unknowing that the artist can yield to the repressed images which surface. The artist, in effect, dreams while wide awake.

What is implicit in the subject matter of my work is a struggle between opposing forces: the thanatotic impulse (Freud’s death wish) and eros Nietzsche’s will to power or Spinoza’s conatus. Therein lies a creeping awareness of mortality which binds all humanity. But there is also the possibility of transcendence – something which awaits us perhaps at the other end – a suggestion of the eschaton. The work then is not the ongoing battle between the sons of darkness and light as suggested in the Aprochrypha but as contours giving shape and form and meaning to my pieces. The rest is up to the viewer to decipher. Each piece is a narrative though incomplete. The viewer has the task of offering a conclusion. Every work of art remains open in this way that though it hangs on a wall it reaches beyond itself to the viewer.

Each creation rests on a continuum between the creator and the viewer. And each one who meanders down the aisle viewing paintings hung on walls has this task of making sense of it. A work of art is not the agglomeration of pigment upon a flat surface glistening under a spotlight. It is something more. It is an experiential process of unfoldment from the kernel of an idea in the artist’s imagination all the way through to the viewer. The painting is recreated each time it is viewed. And it is by keeping this in mind that I have consciously created these works.” Artist Statement