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Jon Cox

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Golden Garden (2022), acrylic on canvas, mixed media, 16 in by 20 in.

An Experimental Life

Jon Cox was born in 1973 in Balclutha and attended South Otago High School before moving to Dunedin in 1991 to join the music scene, playing in bands such as Isolation Backlash and The Strangeloves. After enrolling at University of Otago in 1994 where he completed 120 points of first year papers over three years, he concluded that the truth was not to be found in graduate education – just as his close friend the poet Nick Ascroft had predicted. Jon then left Dunedin for London which started him on a lifelong love affair with travel and travel photography. On his return, he spent time in Invercargill where he studied audio production and released music under the moniker The Lazy Gene. Moving to Melbourne in 2011 afforded him the opportunity to travel for months at a time each year. He went to places such as India and Iran where he discovered the desert and the beauty of decaying buildings. During this period he developed his skills as a photographer, focusing on street photography and portraits, capturing the lines and stories on the faces of his subjects.

In 2020, Jon returned to Dunedin during the pandemic. He knew he could never leave; his parents were aging and his vagabond days had come to an end. On January 1, 2021, living in Port Chalmers and missing the excitement of travel and new experiences, he decided to embark on another adventure, this time on canvas. With no previous painting experience he was taught by the materials he worked with, continuing his pursuit of “an experimental life” – this time by baking soaking canvases in the sun and then finding them cracked and reformed in unexpected ways. Soot retrieved from chimneys, rusted metal from Otago Harbour, chalk and clay, as well as the traditional oil and acrylic pigments, contributed to the textured, amalgamations that characterised the surfaces of his paintings. This constant experimentation with different aggregate media fuelled and stimulated his practice. Having a long-term fascination with liquids dating back to his youth, Jon frequently produced his work in a meditative state, following the flow and course of the medium. In consequence, the works are layered and cumulative in which what is below is equally important as what is visible.

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Details: texture, flow and surface in the paintings of Jon Cox

De Profundis

Conversations with Jon Cox, Fall 2024

During most of his adult life, Jon Cox regularly played his electric guitar, improvising in private––even to television audio at times. Though his interest in the visual arts dates back to his youth, it was only recently, during the pandemic, isolated and removed from his usual context, that he turned to painting––continuing his solitary musical activities throughout this same period. His music, thus, was his most sustained influence in developing his project as a painter, his most constant companion.

Jon never imposes an interpretation upon his viewers. His paintings are deliberately not figurative––they are expressive metaphors that emerge out of his state of mind when he is painting, much like his improvisations. For this artist, painting, like musical improvisation is a time-based process of complete immersion in the medium; his work asks viewers to take a similar position, to allow themselves to be lost for a period of time in his works, to give themselves over to the tonalities and rhythms of the work as they would to a long guitar “solo,” without seeking to assign a particular meaning. The artist asks us to experience the painting as we would a musical performance.

The De Profundis series (2023), which follows a set of almost manic, hyper-pigmented works created in 2021 and 2022, illustrates perhaps most palpably this dimension of Cox’s work, its relations to his musical practice. These paintings offer a black, largely unreflective, surface, modulated and formed into a distinctive rippling semi-relief, at times marked by obvious cracks in the thick, dark medium––to the point that the work might be almost be described as a “bas-relief” because of its sculptural qualities. The opacity and austerity of the paint (in fact an amalgamation of many materials, including soot), its subdued and sombre tonalities, is set in opposition to the gentle rhythms that define the paintings compositionally. These repeating lines and motifs, which traverse the painting, lend a reflective, meditative dimension to the work. This emphasis on tonality (the varying degrees of blackness) and rhythmic repeating pattern recall the musical influences that define Cox’s aesthetic. The sense of meter that marks the varying tonalities of a “riff,” for example, as it develops over time, here reappear as compositional motifs that define the pictorial plane.

”De Profundis,” in English “from out of the depths,” is the title of a prayer based on Psalm 130, which includes this same phrase; it is also the title of a frequently re-published essay, written in the form of a letter, by Oscar Wilde included in the 2011 collection, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings. In his opening paragraph, Wilde writes: “Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves.” The title underlines the emotional field out of which this series emerges, through a process that defies the logical terms of conscious thought, embodied in the artist’s practice as is his music.

The square painting Dasein, ”being” or “to be” in English, constitutes an exception in this grouping, which in a sense it is; as its title indicates it is not part of the series as such. It has none of the sculptural qualities of the other four panels. Its flat textured surface is organised into disintegrating geometric figures. Cox describes it as a kind of rupture or stopping point. And indeed, though perhaps the least sculptural work in terms of surface, compositionally it suggests a sense of finality and stasis, in opposition to the fluid rhythms of the other works, which present as snap shots of something that precedes and extends beyond the pictorial plane. In this context, the composition of Dasein might be said to provide a kind of closure to the series, while suggesting the possibilities of a new set of paintings elaborating similar visual motifs. “Dasein,” the title, evokes the artist’s interest in existentialism, the difficulties of ”being,” the struggle to exist, the ontological dilemmas of the twenty-first century artist. Painting like music gives forms to these dilemmas without announcing or analysing them as such.

Any number of contemporary musicians in Dunedin have explored the visual arts; what sets Jon Cox’s work apart is that his foray into painting focuses on a particular way of “creating,” one that is transferred, and thus transformed, from one medium to another. We look at these paintings and understand them as we understand music, within the period of our attention, without recourse to words.

Hilary Radner, Dunedin, May 2024

References

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, ed. Colm Tóibín (London: Penguin, 2011).

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Project Gutenberg eBook, 2007 (originally published 1913). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/921/921-h/921-h.htm