Perrotin is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of the artist Jason Boyd Kinsella, Alchemy of the Eternal Self, marking his first show at the gallery Shanghai space. One sculpture and thirteen paintings all told, the exhibition is a wide repertoire of portraits, each an impression of the mind’s inner workings.
Text by Paige Haran
Jason Boyd Kinsella bends over a notebook in the middle of a clearing, on the crest of a hill, sketching. The hills rise along the Mediterranean, just behind Cannes, in the Castellas region of France. It’s summer, and the scratch of Kinsella’s pencil merges with the cicada-speckled hum. Overhead, the sky seems as white as the sun, heat polished like a pearl. A setting, that in its timelessness, he feels at odds with. Far away, the world whips and froths, and Kinsella, brush in hand, begins to paint the large-scale work Le Jardin (2025), an anxiety spreading like the wingspan of cypress and pine at his back.
Certainly the garden is uneasy.
In greyscale, Le Jardin is a work that must be read almost more through the artist’s hand than through the viewer’s eye. The canvas is populated with monochrome creatures in distress; Kinsella’s paint brush like a mother bird moving slowly toward each frozen, up-turned mouth. Bristles sweep the ribs from the inside: a loosening of cylinder-shaped guts, two-by-four bones, a queasy feeling of gizzard and cold pulp.
The painting’s giant arching ribcage nods to another vaulted space along the French Riviera. In a deconsecrated chapel in once communist-controlled Vallauris, Picasso painted the sweeping diptych mural La Guerre et la Paix. The mural, finished in 1952, is a powerful message about humanity. One side depicts a subterranean apocalypse, ‘The War’, while the other side shows a utopian garden scene, ‘The Peace.’ Kinsella’s Le Jardin releases Picasso’s forms from their walls and underground realms, little shadows of burden filling the foreground of his own canvas. A display of our collective psyche.
Kinsella’s process starts with the heavy lifting: a rapid, no-frills-sketch, like unbrushed hair across the page. This stream of consciousness then crystallizes on canvas, precise forms and lighting so soap-smooth that they look almost computer-generated. His final compositions don’t look fused or forced; they float together, in what Kinsella might attribute to the teachings of Alan Watts and the Taoist philosophy wu wei (无为, meaning effortless action). In Lennox (2025), warm-toned planks stretch into space, enlightened spheres perched on their edges with a remarkable self-assuredness. Helen (2025) is more compact, with cream and lavender blocks that purse gently around white circular fruits. The geometric design is equal parts modular and arboreal.
“I’m a collector of things at heart,” Kinsella confesses. You can see this in the way he intuitively assembles his compositions like personal altars or anatomical puzzles. This sensitivity preserves the light, precarious gravity within each portrait. The show’s lone bronze sculpture, Julia (2025), is derived from a prior painting and gives one of Kinsella’s figures new dimensional life. A poised assembly of geometric forms balanced on a cantilevered rod, Julia evokes Henry Moore by way of Jacques Lipchitz. Dignified, with a taste for distortion.
A smaller painting, Fancis (2025), was inspired by a piece of paper suspended from a thread. The work is more minimal than others, yet the few objects orbiting the spiraled sheet create a kinetic logic. Kinsella proves art can be both joyful and serious: the intuitive circling the artificial, the classical circling the absurd.
The painting Luna (2025) is a visual tonic to Kinsella’s unease in Le Jardin. The figure’s posture is borrowed from Jean-François Millet’s famous 1853 scene of laborers, Summer, The Gleaners. She shares the same crouched form to Millet’s women, tenderly touching the earth as if to sow seeds. A slight stylistic departure from Kinsella’s earlier works, the scale is different: Luna’s whole figure is in the frame, not just her head and shoulders. What looks like fingers are softer, less knife-like, more biomorphic, more hopeful. And rather than meeting the viewer’s gaze, she focuses on the land and the garden to come.
Though his subjects are often seen as idiosyncratic or surreal, it is important to note that Kinsella emerges from a longer, more rigorous tradition of geometric abstraction: from Mondrian’s mystic grids, through Charles Biederman’s structural reliefs, and into the cosmic scaffolding of Al Held. Where those artists sought to map universal truths, Kinsella, instead, turns the architecture inward toward the fractured terrain of the psyche. This, in the end, is the stuff of real alchemy, the domain of the best portraitists—Rembrandt, Neel—though Kinsella builds with stranger parts. The pipes, beams, and spheres somehow carry human weight. A Pixar movie: the toys have frozen around us with an incredible air of vulnerability and secrecy. The emotional arc, as hard to describe as it is, is uncanny, tender, powerful.
Born in 1969 in Toronto, Canada
Lives and works in Oslo, Norway
Jason Boyd Kinsella started painting again in 2019 after a 30 year hiatus, now splitting his time between Oslo and Los Angeles. Unveiling mankind’s psychological makeup lies at the heart of Kinsella’s practice. In his work, he breaks down the personality traits of his characters into distinct geometric units whose shape, colour and size define their individuality based on the Myers-Briggs personality test, anchoring his subjects in the essence of their psychological attributes. If the clean surface of his paintings may recall the Old Masters’ works, his aesthetic and methods are resolutely contemporary.
More about the artist
