Jesse Draxler in conversation with Editor in Chief Alice Zucca

Jesse Draxler lives immersed in a chaotic and dystopian universe that he describes by investigating the psychosomatic discrepancy that transfigures and deforms the perception of reality. While “clouding” the sight with an element of disorientation, Jesse’s intent turns against this aspect, in a need for interaction expressed in the desire to understand others and to be understood as well. Jesse is color blind, and his works, perhaps precisely as a consequence of this condition, display a peculiar chromatic connotation: they are always in black and white. The most striking effect that this singular choice produces is to make the artist’s invariably monochromatic creations universally recognizable. His art describes and reveals an acute sensitivity that scrutinizes a hyper-technological reality paralyzed by an unbridgeable lack of connection and where every hint, every movement, every glance produces desirable emotions.

By subverting the usual setup of reality, the artist uses different expressive methods, such as painting and collage, to outline a world populated by characters waiting to be discovered. Draxler, in his mashups, deliberately confuses and bewilders the viewer’s perception through a singular narrative expedient: attributing tangible form to emotions, concrete semblances to moods, to pursue the intent of helping the viewer to understand. Photographic abstractions, paintings, textual experiments are some of the provocative elaborations through which Jesse’s eclectic artistic creativity performs. His distorted portraits where the strokes of the subjects are deformed, duplicated, or deleted, are certainly to be considered his most famous creations. The leitmotif of his artistic production is to transfigure and twist the original features to obtain different, unusual and unexpected entities. The viewer observing the faces reproduced by the artist is disoriented, disturbed by a representation that starts from a dark past and through a stagnant present outlines a dark, disconcerting and daunting future. These “masks” stand out with the utmost evidence, both thanks to digital manipulations and to hand-made work, strictly painted only in black and white; the figures are essentially self-portraits that recall the primordial concepts of death and terror.

Jesse Draxler subjects his characters to a process of deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction to show them as paradoxical beings devoid of humanity, apathetic, surreal and incoherent and at the same time also the opposite, like the multiple and contradictory universes, not always connected, that the artist tries to put in contact to forge new speculative mixes. His inclination to generate new and original elements, with properties and appearance totally dissimilar to the initial ones, is his most representative connotation, his most authentic peculiarity, and promptly arouses incessant debates on the artist’s work. A tumultuous mix of enchanting beauty and disconcerting horror denotes the artist’s conception of reality. The result for the observer is a disorienting emotional shock that hinders an analytical and rational observation of the figures represented, preventing them from perceiving and understanding the meaning of everything. An inextricable intertwining of confusion with an inescapable epilogue: questioning the concreteness of reality thus undermining all certainty.

Alice Zucca: Your figures, often anonymous and transfigured, appear in principle as deprived of their formal identity and not only as a matter of form, but even in the very process that initiates them (The collage, which in itself involves the creation of a different reality starting from different elements). Yet the subjects of your works, even if deconstructed and recomposed inversely in these combinations of collaged photography and painting – which started in a process of loss of definitions – are able to become very clear and universally recognizable, in my opinion as if they had always been there in that form as they convey concepts and feelings are what we can all recognize ourselves in, whether they’re negative or positive. This is interesting if we think that starting from a purely de-identifying concept you can break down reality by shedding light on a new one, which perhaps was already inherent in the elements from which it is recomposed. Basically, the act of living itself sees man find himself creating and destroying the same dynamics, until, by not really understanding the manifestation of this spiral, he then increases his awareness and rediscovers his own identity in the united broken fragments of his own experience, of his error and fears, now observed in a unitary vision of causes and consequences.
I would like to talk with you about the concept of identity in this light, about your message, what you personally achieve by doing this and about this constructive / deconstructive process.

Jesse Draxler: You’re hitting the nail on the head here re: the relation between the work and self. Breaking down reality in order to shed light on a new one. All this is present in the work. My practice has always been a reflection of myself, my internal cosmology, the things I have gone through and am going through, and the things I am pondering philosophically. I can’t seem to get away from that dynamic. It marries me to the work, entangles us in a way that I am unable to detach from it, for better and often for worse. It is universal because we’re all going through this, we all break ourselves down and build ourselves up from the rubble. It is the human condition.

AZ: How would you describe your approach to the creative act? Are you methodical in your choices, in choosing or intervening on an image or creating it because it recalls from the beginning a certain experience? Or is there a component of randomness in the process that leads you to interpret the meaning of the image once you see it recomposed in front of you? Is this a ritual or an impulse? Or a necessity… is there a cathartic component in this deconstructive / constructive act of reality?

JD: There are elements of all that in my practice. Like contained chaos, I set up parameters for chaos to happen within. I am a fairly regimented person, but within that regiment is the space for impulsivity. I follow invisible lines and work with perceived elements rather than literal. For the most part I let things play themselves out rather than be too intellectually heavy handed and there is certainly a catharsis in the acts of my practice. Though art is both the antagonist and pacifier – it can cause great anguish, but also alleviates it.

AZ: What are you working on right now? Can you tell me about the show on view at NO Gallery, and also how the period of the pandemic influenced your artistic research and your perception of reality in the lockdown period since as part of the show there are also works that you produced during that time?

JD: When Covid hit I was in the middle of working on the pieces that would make up a solo show at No Gallery initially scheduled for June, but by mid March we had cancelled the show indefinitely. Despite the show being cancelled I decided to move ahead and finish all of the work as if it weren’t, although many of the concepts I was working with at the time suddenly began to feel trite in light of what everyone was now dealing with. This caused a reaction that led to me cancelling out a lot of that work by angrily and mindlessly painting and/or pasting over it, which in itself became concept; a real time reaction to the current circumstance. Once I finished that body of work I crashed. My mental state became very tenuous. I was considering moving to the woods of the midwest where my father lives, but instead moved closer to the Ocean. After a month or so of heavy introspection and brutal self criticism I began to work on some panels again which turned out to be the Shifted series, waving chandeliers as an indication of a shifting in foundation. I felt a levity and renewed confidence from working on these pieces. I also re-examined the previous work and pushed their purpose and explored working with new materials and objects, while injecting a sense of play and wry humor to the work. I do not believe the body of work that makes up Table Of Losses would be as strong as it is without the break, forced patience, and period of crisis. It couldn’t have gone any other way.

Table of Losses is the first exhibition in NO Gallery’s new pop-up format, which provides pointed and timely responses to local and global conditions. On display in the former Black Dragon Society gallery space on Chinatown’s Chung King Road, Draxler’s most ambitious body of work to date captures the pain and despair of this historical moment while also offering glimpses of hope and even humor. Monumental panels featuring images of chandeliers are dense and textured, disclosing the tremors at our foundations that threaten to destroy fragile webs of value and beauty. Draxler’s “conglomerations” of works made before and after Covid arrived in the US combine mediums (paint, pasted paper, appropriated images) and formal languages from high, commercial, and street art in ritualistic combinations. The snarls of materials, signs, and symbols function both as sites for expression and shields from danger. Textual works reproduce and reinvent the cascade of messages coming from all directions, while silent screams ripple across serial appropriations. With tones ranging from deadpan to seething, the works in Table of Losses powerfully negotiate surface and depth, interior and exterior— what we keep private and what must become public.