Corpus Painting Otis Jones

With “Corpus Painting”, Semiose éditions is dedicating a new collection editorial entirely dedicated to painting. In 48 pages, bound in a beautiful book, each of the opus focuses on a specific set of paintings, completed of a text in French and English. An invitation to dive into painting, to understand the springs of a series, to contemplate a sequence of images, with the same devotion and passion that one has for altarpieces or painted icons. Devoid of pictorial motifs, narratives and sometimes even colors, the work of Texas artist Otis Jones is understated but intensely physical and stubbornly original. Fleeing the grandiose, the painter is interested in the essential: the relationship between form, composition, color and the subtle nuances that give his paintings a meditative character. To obtain an abraded texture of intense visual depth, the artist repeats an empirical ritual unchangeable: the canvases, roughly cut, are fixed on frames in irregularly shaped wood, then painted and sanded alternately. A number limited number of formal elements are used – lines, dots and squares – of which contrasting colors are extracted from previous layers and sufficiently important to be spared from erasure. of permanence. Born in Galveston, Texas (US), in 1946, Otis Jones graduated from Galveston State University from Kansas in 1969 and the University of Oklahoma in 1972. His works are included in numerous private and public collections such as the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City).