JIM THORELL

The act of painting, like playing certain types of music, like days spent drifting through the city and bumping into friends, like letting one’s body collapse into beach sand, has the capacity to melt the borders of the self. In Jim Thorell’s new work, this melting is mobilized within a type of abstract picture wherein the painted mark collapses into a form of free-writing. Exceeding the boundaries of the autonomous composition, this body of work performs the oceanic. Its embodied collectivity spills over the borders of the typically socio-political, instead speaking from the resonant structure of being.

Tropics of Beach Naps circumnavigates a particular feeling; that of finally being there, out of your head, out of the constructed life that we call reality, into a state of presence wherein the relationship between self and world hovers at the edge of dissolution. This exhibition’s optimism is tempered by a close attention to the human structures that persist even in experiences of the collective-oceanic, even in moments of hypnagogic collapse. While patches of colour drift freely within picture planes, Thorell’s lines persistently recall the linguistic and diagrammatic. Interweaving the mathematical, glyphic, and poetic, his images suggest the scribbled marginalia of writing notepads, or layers of mark-making, applied through years and years on the surfaces of cities and their buildings. In this way, the work reminds of the certainty that a radical openness to the world and to one another will always and forever wrestle with the fraught nature of being a person, bounded by one’s own skin and bones, and implicated in the social and built environment.

Thorell’s mark-making and all that it implies collaborates with the exhibition’s nomenclature, which sends the work and its meaning through a kaleidoscopic diffraction. The word ‘tropic’ denotes not only azure shores and blinding white beaches but also systems of topographical and astronomical mapping–such as the grid–which is ever-present in these paintings, warped and amplified into a more active correspondence with felt being. In turn, the word ‘tropism’ describes the way in which living organisms re-orient themselves in relation to external stimuli. Like how the flowers in a meadow reach to face the sun, or how sun-starved humans go outside in winter, turning their faces into the light. These paintings model how artworks themselves help us to perform this tropic movement, of inviting the world and one another in.

Part of this ‘letting in’ involves accepting that even the most tropic bliss retains the textures, attitudes, and grains, of the individual. What we have here is not painting as sugary idealism, so much as painting as an echo of the ideal in singing and struggling tension with the actual.