The Target exhibition by Patrick H. Jones, held at Duarte Sequeira Gallery in Braga from October 5 to November 30, 2024, reveals a compelling glimpse of unfulfilled desire and the elusive nature of accomplishment. Through large-scale paintings that depict horses racing toward an unachievable endpoint, Jones captures the perennial human struggle for meaning amidst futility. This sense of longing—compelling yet sorrowfully cyclical—calls to mind the myth of Sisyphus, grounding Target in a philosophy of persistence against inevitable defeat.
Drawing from an ongoing journey of self-discovery, Jones employs metaphorical subjects—such as animals and shadowy figures—to probe the limits of control and acceptance in human experience. As he moves from grief to contemplation of life’s cyclical nature, Jones crafts a practice that resonates with themes of transience and relentless pursuit, themes central to the Target paintings.
The main gallery space consists of paintings depicting horses racing toward smaller brightly coloured Peter Blake-esque targets. This imagery presents a seemingly clear metaphor: the horses, without bridles or jockeys, are caught mid-stride, seemingly in endless pursuit of a goal that will forever evade them. The canvases—split into fragmented planes—act as visual finish lines, lines that remain forever out of reach and hint at an unending task. In this, Jones creates a Sisyphean landscape where desire and achievement never meet. The “target” in Jones’s work, static and brightly rendered, contrasts against the horses’ strained motion, underscoring a poignant sense of impossibility. Here, each brushstroke becomes a critique of ambition and the inherent sadness in perpetual striving, emphasising a disjuncture between motivation and fulfilment.
Jones’s technical approach amplifies the conceptual tension within Target. Each painting begins with a muted palette that suggests a hazy, introspective mood, only to be overtaken by saturated, almost defiant colours—a shift that occurred after Jones received news of his impending fatherhood. Rather than subduing the bright tones, he allowed them to flourish, embracing a vibrant optimism within an otherwise solemn theme. This juxtaposition between the unbridled hues and sombre motifs serves to create what a disjunctive aesthetic, where the sensory impact disrupts simple narrative resolution.
In the horses the materiality of Jones’s work—thick applications of paint give way to shadowy forms, blurring the line between figure and grounds the result is a textured, almost topographical quality that suggests churned-up earth, adding a tactile reality to the otherwise abstracted concept of the race. Through these layered applications, Jones captures a feeling of movement and struggle, a pursuit that becomes cyclical and timeless, which is reinforced in how the large scale horse paintings are placed in the gallery, moving in a circle through the room the flow of the race being intermittently punctuated with the small Pop Art targets.
Patrick H. Jones’s Target offers a vivid contemplation on life’s endless pursuits and the spaces in between action and fulfilment. His work resonates not merely as an exploration of personal grief or artistic evolution but as a universal narrative on the futility and beauty of striving toward unreachable goals. Jones’s paintings suggest that while the targets we chase may remain forever out of reach, the meaning lies within the pursuit itself. The paintings in Target, with their vibrant yet restrained energy, invite viewers to embrace the cycle of hope, disappointment, and resilience that defines the human experience. To echo the words of Albert Camus’s notion that of “the struggle itself…is enough to fill a man's heart.” it is often the striving itself that gives purpose to the chase.
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