Jon Wealleans

Jon Wealleans, connoisseur of the curious, the arcane and the incongruous, has assembled two complementary bodies of work for his new one-person exhibition. The second of these (chronologically) is a series of interiors with strong still life elements, which take as their subject his own home surroundings; while the first group of works, more loosely knit, go some (but by no means all) of the way to explaining the contents of the interior subjects: spanning a period of some six years in his travels, these paintings reflect John Wealleans’ experiences in the realms of the exotic, some in the flesh and some in his imagination, from Mexico to Vietnam and southern India.

If the exotic can translate into the everyday, forming the substance of what Wealleans describes as his Kitchen Kitsch sequence, it is a process in which conscious design plays no part. As a successful, innovative, practising architect for much of his career, he comes from a generation trained in the modernist tradition, which presented him early on with a significant conundrum: how to reconcile purist Bauhaus methodology with the anti-rationalist approach of architects and designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, not to mention also the super-sensualist Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, all of whom held for him far greater appeal.

A compulsive habitué and scavenger of street markets from Bermondsey and Portobello Road to the bazaars of Mumbai and Hampi in Karnataka, Wealleans revels in the stimulus provided by the accumulated detritus of the Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements, along with Victoriana and contemporary tourist paraphernalia acquired all over – fine craftsmanship mingling with primitive or naïve folk art ephemera, from the quasi-valuable to worthless tat.

Jon Wealleans’ first appearance with the Gallery came with his intriguingly layered contributions to the theme exhibition Roma (2000), in which his paintings conflatedancient, baroque and contemporary Roman elements, as the city itself does so effortlessly and elegantly with every viewpoint. The layering was an essential characteristic for a painter who for all his travels is never strictly topographic. On occasion, (as, for instance, in depicting timber ship-building at Diu on the Indian coast) Wealleans may confine himself to precise, intensely accurate rendering of a complex, traditional pursuit. More typical, however, is the artist’s natural inclination to identify subjects either where there is some collision between present setting and ancient culture – or when he can absorb and adapt local painting traditions, as when he adopts a particular palette in introducing other ingredients and perspectives which have their roots in the magic realist idiom of South America.

Forming a bridge (or breathing space) between these two vibrant groups of paintings - the interiors and the largely outdoor compositions with exotic (and sometimes imaginary) subjects - is Wealleans’ ‘garden’ series. Most of the garden paintings originate in home territory but there are some (such as the Black Sea and Vietnamworks) which have a remoter origin. All of them, however, share in one way or another a feature characteristic of Wealleans’ approach, his fondness for ‘saccades’ – the unexpected, almost cinematic shifts in focus in either fore- or background which parallels his approach to light in these compositions – no single source of illumination here, but rather an even, undiluted brilliance which mirrors the ubiquitous flood of light in the contemporary interior.

Biography

Jon Wealleans (born Yorkshire 1946) studied architecture at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art followed by post-graduate studies in design at the Royal College of Art. Attracted from the start in his architectural studies by the arts of perspective and the study of shadows as taught in sciagraphy, Wealleans relished the computer free environment of the time with its encouragement to wander between different departments and disciplines.

Wealleans’ career in architecture began with his work with the Building Design Partnership, then Foster Associates before he went on to develop his own practice. In the 1960s he designed shops for the now legendary Mr Freedom and other pop-linked environments as well as furniture which gave him a high public profile and appearances on two BBC TV programs, Design by Five. Concurrently, Wealleans taught architecture and design at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, the Royal College of Art and Kingston University. At around this time he collaborated also with rock musicians and their management, including the Elton John Organisation and Led Zeppelin. Having always painted, though self-taught, Wealleans has devoted increasing time to his painting since the 1990s, and has participated in several of the Gallery’s theme exhibitions including Roma (2000), Lair of the Leopard (2005), Everyone Sang (2006) and РОДИНА: contemporary painters from the West winter in Russia (2008).

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