Jim Threapleton is an artist working in London and Vancouver. He studied History of Art at Manchester University. In 2008 his BIFA nominated debut feature film, Extraordinary Rendition premiered in competition at the Edinburgh and Locarno International Film Festivals. He completed his MA in 2010 and was awarded his doctorate in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, London in 2016. He has exhibited internationally, including shows at the Courtauld, London, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore and Carles Taché Gallery, Barcelona. His work is held in a number of private collections. He was included in the 2021 Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting.
Threapleton pursues abstract mark to the threshold of representation. Gestural improvisation animates a precarious and unreliable pictorial territory. The spectacle of image is superseded by a contemplative, expressive material silence that alludes indirectly to a sense of interiority. Pushed to the brink of illustration abstract form provokes collaboration between the work and the viewer. Painting becomes a virtual Mobius-band; indeterminacy returning the spectator to the point of departure. The disrupted quality of form is symptomatic of a process best described as sabotage. Painting is distilled to binary language. Zero or one. Depth or flatness. A stark economy derived from the push and pull of control and accident — from the painfully slow process of painting fastness.
Curator and writer Matt Price comments:
In Threapleton’s practice he is circumnavigating the moment at which abstraction triggers the eye and mind to read imagery as if it were a depiction of real objects in real space, but there are no real objects and there is no real space. Instead, we are caught in a cognitive trap of sorts, in limbo between differing routes for mental image processing. It is an exciting place to be as we’re geared up to decipher, ready to interpret, poised to make up the missing pieces of visual information, but the answers are in our minds, the questions in the painting.
Michiko Oki writes:
In Jim Threapleton’s paintings, the most prominent narrative is that of an anxious but curious excitement towards the dark spectacle of the overwhelming forces, or of something unknown. Incomplete somehow, but nevertheless prescient. His works appear to me as signs for the sublime of ominous stormy landscapes reminiscent of the Romantic paintings, or, maybe, piles of crooked bodies like those in Gericault’s masterwork. There is the sense of the classical in his abstraction that invokes images and narratives familiar to the Western history of art. At the same time, this excitement seems to stem from Threapleton’s fascination with the illusionary effect of the medium of paint itself. Appealing to the ambiguity of image formation through variously manipulated brushstrokes, his images play on the precarious effect of vision between the self-awareness of the materiality of the medium and the plausibility of figuration. In this dizziness of visual/material play, the shadows of limitless depth consume representations, one after another. This optical existentialism in Threapleton’s paintings invites the nostalgic return of the primordial anxiety that reminds us of the cave that we still inhabit.