Jasmine Gregory: to be, or to seem?

For some artists, art is above all a doing. That is a kind of fluid process of transforming matter triggered by the need to express oneself and guided by instinct. Jasmine Gregory, who has been living in culturally rich Zurich for the past few years but was born in the United States (in 1987), is part of this restricted company. I say restricted because artists able to give with a gesture “life” to matter are rare; and even rarer among them are those able to escape the shackles of style. Indeed, at this time, one of the most striking features of Jasmine Gregory’s work is that it can evolve in any direction. Her artistic practice is open and promising.

Jasmine Gregory institutional exhibitions of the past two years – CAPC Bordeaux, France; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland; Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy – prove that she can paint, process installation environments, and create sculptural objects, mixing levels and registers without ever losing control of what she is saying. Yes, because while it is true that that Jasmine Gregory is undoubtedly sensitive to the purely visual values of the artwork, that is, to form, color, the nature of materials, and their (sometimes pleasantly funky) aesthetic organization, the themes that the artist addresses are elevated rather than pop: gender issues, the theme of inequality, social issues, economic issues.

As I had the opportunity to verify in a recent meeting of ours, Jasmine Gregory’s artistic practice feeds on nonfiction rather than popular culture—without therefore denying the latter, on the contrary. While devoid of any form of intellectualism, Jasmine Gregory’s gaze is aimed at depth rather than surface. One need only visit the artist’s Instagram profile to realize this. I was struck by the post dedicated to the Linus cartoons, which Jasmine’s father calls “the funnies,” but which evidently, as we know, are not naive at all. In the first cartoon in the gallery, Linus tells Charlie Brown, “The price of everything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

Returning to the idea of giving “life” to something, I consider the most iconic series of works produced by Jasmine Gregory so far, namely the one devoted to the theme of capital through the reinterpretation of advertising posters of brands such as UBS and Patek Philippe. Like Linus’s phrase, the headlines of these of companies propose absolute concepts regarding “high” themes which somehow transcend immanence to place a service (banking) and a product (a watch) in an eschatological discourse. To communicate a brand, one chooses to talk about man and his destiny. This is a marketing strategy. If you want to sell a drill, Philip Kotler said, you don’t have to tell about its technical features but magnify the hole it can make. “People don’t want a drill,” Kotler points out “they want a hole in the wall.”

This is where painting, one of the practices through which humans try to overcome the problem of death—overshadowed by both advertisements in question—intervenes. It should be noted that Jasmine Gregory paints these works with traditional technique, skillfully challenging the graphic and formal perfection of the advertising image. After all, the artist seems to say, even a painting tends toward the absolute. But it does so by proving what human beings are able to achieve out of a need for love, probably with their work. Artistic, manual, instinctive, and therefore imperfect making is in itself antithetical to industrial production, for which imperfection is a defect.

Painting, clock, and capital aim to survive unchanging over time, but they pursue the goal in different ways. The hole, not the drill. On the one hand, there is a recognized but completely impersonal value; on the other hand, there is a subjective, individually connoted one. It seems that through this series of works, Jasmine Gregory wants to ask us what we really mean to be while anticipating that the answer for some will be a non-choice. Like clocks, after all, works of art require capital to acquire them. And perhaps it should be noted that UBS has been a sponsor of Art Basel for 20 years. Where then is the difference? Again, it is an identity issue. Whereas industrial goods and financial assets represent the same thing to all their owners, a work of art even the most canonical one, is unique and as such projects its uniqueness onto the individual who acquires it, defining him or her for better or worse. While acquiring an industrial good is theoretically impossible to “go wrong” (although the watch may break and the bank fail), each work is a discourse unto itself which speaks deeply about the individual who acquired it, his culture, his intelligence, his values, and above all, the way he makes his decisions.

To be then, or to seem?

June 21, 2024