An Intuitive Approach: Art by Jon Duci
Piece Of The Puzzle, acrylic on canvas
Jon Duci is a mixed media and collage artist from Long Island, New York. In his artistic practice, Jon works in a style that combines a methodical process with an intuitive approach to subject and composition.
Human faces are a common motif throughout Jon’s artistic oeuvre, appearing in paintings, drawings, and collages in varying degrees of realism. I’m interested in how Jon’s collages reflect the compositional style of his paintings and drawings. As we saw in our previous feature of Jon’s work with figures and bodies, the artist’s works use human forms that are distorted and abstracted to the point that they take on an eerie, grotesque quality. This is especially reinforced by the colour palette than Jon favours in his paintings, a cool palette with hues of green and blue that sit very much in opposition to the warm neutrals that one might expect in human figure paintings.
It’s fascinating, then, to see how Jon’s photographic collages are both similar and wildly different. The medium necessitates more “realistic” colour palettes, and the human faces are familiar rather than distorted. There’s the same overlapping, detail-packed composition, however, that encourages the viewer to explore every part of the image.
