Jedd Garet, American (1955 - )

  Painter Jedd Garet was born in 1955. Part of the "new painting" movement considered a 1980s Neo-Expressionist -- he combines figuration and abstraction in narrative works. Ambiguous unrelated images are like visions in metaphysical landscapes of Classical architectural fragments and atmospheric forms, as in "Wonderland of Forms," in which columns float in illusionistic space.

Influenced by seminal Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, Garet uses garish colors in jarring contrasts to explore relationships between nature, man and art. In later work, figures, trees and other more recognizable objects were added to the minimalist flat ground, creating tension.

His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Paine-Weber, New York City.

Of his intentions Garet says: 'No words, no natural elements, nothing natural, including the figures. They were statues, not people . . . It's not that nature is hard to do, it's that it's against the rules. I broke down all my rules - one by one.' (Jedd Garet: Nature as Artifice; Essay by Robert Pincus-Witten. 1984, HC, 167 pgs. illus., ISBN 0-942642-12-0)

Excerpts from reviews include:
Maurice Poirier, ARTnews, 4/1986
"His appropriation of modes and motifs from de Chirico especially, together with the glaring mannerist quality of his color, is still in evidence...Garet's greatest talent may well lie in landscape and seascape, and few artists know how to exploit the raw radiance latent in acrylic with as much poetic flair."

John Zinnser, Art in America, 9/1989
"Jedd Garet...is an artist for whom subtlety has never been the issue...His earliest works were rendered in macho swirls of acrylic impasto. For all their reckless speed and abandon, the paintings managed to look like instant masterpiecesclassicism with a raffish downtown spirit. In them, Garet borrowed freely from Giorgio de Chirico, especially his images of a psychologically charged landscape inhabited by solitary, mannequin-like figures."

Nancy Grimes, ARTnews, 12/1987
"During the early 80s Jedd Garet brought into the mainstream a style or school of art that looked purposely inept. 'Bad' artists favored awkward, childish drawing, off-balance composition, discordant color, and slapdash paint application. Neo-Expressionism represented the Golden Age of Bad. In this selection of recent paintings, Garet brings badness to biomorphic abstraction, proving that he is one of the best bad artists around. By denying expectations of balance, unity, and harmony, Garet unerringly achieves a disquieting offnessam eerie sense that the natural, automatic processes of psyche and soma celebrated by Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism have gone awry...Garet's incredibly studied paintings burlesque the notions of spontaneity and naturalness that have generated so much modern abstraction. Without completely discarding the category of the natural, he suggests that the nature of nature has yet to be determined."

Donald Kuspit, ARTFORUM, 11/1987
"Garet works in a mode that might be called surreal-baroque abstract, with a touch of rococo potential...What garet gives us is a baroque sense of imperfect visionary flight on a surrealist basea sense of incongruous forms mysteriously converging, inhabiting the same pictorial space for no apparent reason...his paintings are full of pathos tending to violence, distilled into a witty, but nonetheless extreme pictorial gesture...The final effect is ornamental in the best sense:...a playful network of light and shade, conveying a sense of emotional peculiarity and sinuousness."