Jonathan Wateridge

Sandanistas, Group Series No. 1,  2008, oil on linen, 272 x 400 cms

Jungle River Landscape with Plane Wreck, Crash Series, 2006, oil on layered perspex, 191 x 270 x 21 cms

Forest Pool, Crash Series, 2007,  oil on linen, 185 x 265 cms

Seascape with Wrecked Battleship, Crash Series, 2006, oil on layered perspex, 191 x 270 x 21 cms

Re enactment Society, Group Series No. 5, 2008, oil on linen, 282 x 400 cms

Space Program, Group Series No. 2,  2008, oil on linen, 292 x 400 cms

Saatchi Gallery –  London, Installation View

The Architect’s House, Another Place Series, 2009, oil on linen, 282 x 400 cms

Eye Network News, Another Place Series,  2009, Oil on canvas, 282 x 400 cms

Directional Interchange, Another Place Series,  2009, oil on canvas, 282 x 400 cms

Artist Statement

Fiction, fabrication, role-play, identity, genre and the idea of ‘construction’ within an image, on both a symbolic and material level, have all become very dominant themes in my work. The element of the ‘constructed’ creates and explores contradictions within notions of the real and therefore our relationship to it. If it’s present in the images I make then – however ‘truthful’ or convincing the figures depicted – the awareness of the underlying construction potentially injects doubt or insecurity into the reading of the painting. In fact, the more convincing and successful I can make the painterly aspects of the picture, the more potent this sense of dislocation potentially becomes.

I have no way of determining an audience’s response but the paintings should create a heightened sense of the ‘real’ despite the image being an almost total fiction.

Artist Statement about the Group Series

I want the viewer to be able to buy in to the image enough to want to spend time with it, to elicit a certain level of recognition that then starts to fragment.

Despite any sense of familiarity one might have with the imagery, seeds of doubt are sewn and you come to recognise that its not what you thought it was.

The only element that should perhaps survive scrutiny are the individuals depicted. The level of identification the viewer has with the figures is therefore fundamental.

It is their peculiarly physical presence that gives the paintings a very uncanny quality. This potential for uncertainty in the pictures is an element I intend to increasingly exploit.

Jonathan Wateridge on All Visual Arts