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Jeremy Kibel

There is an exhilaration one feels when encountering an alien geography, a sense of wonderment and fear, awe and displacement. Jeremy Kibel has been here, in these strange, faraway lands. His paintings seem to embrace a Kashmir of the imagination, a Kilimanjaro from a graphic novel. A locale of adventure, of hideous snows and howling winds, a place to be conquered beneath a jet-black sky.

Kibel is doing any number of strange things to the time-worn genre of landscape. He has hiked in the snows and painted plein air in the mountains, but that barely seems relevant in this obsessive suite of terrain. This is, rather, Kibel’s personal topography; it is a world of struggle and challenge; a world where the individual must make a mark, where the only thing that you can rely on is your own wit and will.

There is, of course, something wonderfully wrong with these paintings. Combining the stygian but glossy black of enamel with the softer, flowing nature of acrylic and bonding the two with the harsh nature of an oil-stick breaks all of the traditional rules. In the thrusting peaks there is a hint of sexuality and in his line-work there is the suggestion of the simplified line-work of a graphic novel - the world of Tin Tin in extremis. Then there is the sheer cinematic narrative that these brooding landscapes suggest.

Geometric line-work criss-cross these barren wastes - the remnants of exploration or the scars of military endeavour. There is a distinct sensation one encounters wandering into Kibel’s landscapes; we are jolted out of the everyday and sent to find our own way into his world. But, far from terrifying, we are drawn into a fantasy of survival. Kibel manages the delicate balancing act of cool modernity and heart-felt landscape painting. He combines age old plein air painting with more recent abstraction and somehow he manages to make it work.

by Ashley Crawford

Artwork courtesy of the artist &
James Makin Gallery (Melbourne)
www.jamesmakingallery.com